Punching our gloves as the sun raced toward dinner, 
we sorted into teams and agreed on the rules
in a minute or less.

By the seventh stretch
We gave up.

I miss the moment his bat cracks the ball.

We’re speaking of salvation, god damn it,
And only the incurious break slumps.

Tommy “Teebs” Pico was a Queer/Art/Mentors inaugural fellow, 2013 Lambda Literary fellow in poetry, and has poems in BOMB, Guernica, and [PANK]. Originally from the Viejas Indian reservation of the Kumeyaay nation, he now lives in Brooklyn and curates the reading series Poets With Attitude (PWA) with Morgan Parker. @heyteebs

These Austrian cows
lying down vaguely chewing
grass what are they think

But I have a million lights
I have two million actually
A whole billboard

We are going to die still falling // for crap about berries, a glass of red wine. It could be worse.  We’re not suicidal, / smack fiends, Swazi.

At night, when everyone's gone, the dark looks like a scatter of tiny bullet holes above her desk in the shape of a heart.

Are the woods still there? The woods were still almost there. 

The heavy moon’s already almost halved itself, the month’s almost passed. I saw

a cat huddled, early this morning, by a

after vomiting
a small order of
onion rings and
chicken fries
from burger king

Jokes for People Who Had Good Fathers

Something about rock and roll music
and leaf blowing,              yard work

Dads who speak in puns and are called
Dad, probably but not

I wear glasses now, Luis,
you wouldn’t even recognize me.

Forkful of Artichoke

He thinks I can will myself to love him,
when I know love as a species of hunger.
I know the heart, like the stomach
cannot will itself to appetite.
Rum-drunk,

We sat many a Saturday
on the bank of The Han River,
in Seoul. Drinking makkoli,
looking at Basquiats, talking
about what it means to be Jewish,
when we danced at Susie Q's to
"Changes"

Space Suit

I fell asleep in my space suit again. I know this is out of hand, but the moon is getting a bad name, and there are men out there who need me to be an example of how to treat the

I.

When I was a kid I believed
in good old-fashioned animistic
souls coming out of the grass
and the sky and the rocks. 

I loved walking
in Las Rocas de Santo Domingo
and seeing

I Have

I have a
wet mouth
in this pink
apartment.

I still have that.

Boy—
you think we’re in love?

Don’t you
roughhouse
with me.

You’re trying.
But at this

15 October

The daytime moon is halved in a bright blue sky and a confusion of birds flows together and apart again over the English/Philosophy building, evading a hawk—this is the feast day of

Ask her to aim her index fingers.
at you. Aim yours.

i.

When the moon card is reversed in the tarot, it means you'll be waiting for a long time to clarify the question you need to ask.

Your question will form like a hydrangea blossom and

Standing in the pieces of a broken guitar
I screamed at the summer for sleeping around
breaking my heart with the rising
in those days I drank wine from the bottle
stranded

I remember
the first time

I saw a foreign
cherry. I blushed

a little armpit.
I saw how a cherry,

in it's candied boredom,
could stain.

The other not truth.
Thus

Nest #1

Of fine black roots
and the space between two classes
of water chutes.

Of crevices
in the folds of the native maize
sowed for kisses.

Of a blue haze
to guide

I had the milk from a dandelion all over my hands once in the sun and in the cracks of my palms and it was getting on my lunch, I kept thinking.

Once my mother painted my fingernails