"en-misting" and "earth is the only planet in our solar system not named after a god"

"On Trepidation" and "When I'm Lonely, I Shop Online for Things I Don't Need"

"32 questions for a photograph" and "Blue Door"

My Harry Styles poem has gotten very good at glass of Lambrusco
on the arm of the sofa not crashing & purpling the floor,
used to play the saxophone
and doesn’t love sexophone jokes
but also

Jeff O told us that he and Brian H split after watching Chasing Amy...

If my father decided to do it...

"Start This One in Bernie Sanders Voice" and "Probably I'm on Fire"

the dictionary says living being...

a man stands on stage his cue cards flashing...

As planned, all this lying worked wonders for his confidence.

On Day One, Larry-the-Lizard quits smoking
and eating saturated crap.
Day Two: he buys a hard pack of Dunhill King Size
on his way to Fatty Patty’s Burger Palace. Why?
Because the purplish

“But beauty wasn’t enough.”
 – Gretchen Marquette
 

Nurturing as a kestrel checking your sheets for mice        I am a woman  designed.   Because  I   was   designed
       it follows that I was

young girls walk alone 
at night and 

                               laugh from their bellies, sing 
                               in jungle gym voices 
                               to cradled stars 

Theater of Inheritance

Wrong to say I accept the rough
face of my family. Your father,

so young-looking, your mother
even more. I grew older than boys

around me because I was

Canada Goose — the age-old adage of 
whether or not a ton of bricks or a ton 

of feathers is heavier & the fact that it’s
always the feathers because you have to live 

with the guilt on

On the tip of my tongue, the shadow of your incomplete rebellion 
a riverine blister ; a city-street broken into brick-brats, 

glued together again to fashion a ceramic gnome, its 
rickety

adjective /

fuck yes

We keep what’s between us a secret. 
I’m supposed to be at your house

and you’re supposed to be at mine,
but, really, we lie in the center of the wheat 

where no one can find us, make

i came to America too young
to be foreign, so all my dreams 
are American and contemporary,
present and blinding as morning-hunger:
a fat gull scavenges for loose plastic bags 
and their

is the egg yolk, broken when it was meant to be fried, 
the sobbing of a child who’s just found 
that their favorite character does not survive, 

the scraped knee, the store out of cigarettes

                                                 ⁠–⁠After José Olivarez 

When Carly’s body
isn’t a body but ash
they wish to be poured
into Lake Washington
below a sun becoming half
a sun,

I took the test. 
Persistent rash? 
A cough? A rumor. 
A fungus 

from that polluted 
Ipanema beach. 
I smiled when I heard, 
took a drag, bent 

my wrist, palm up. Juana 
Delledonne.

I'm up here along the photograph and its shore, calling to you. Dive off your custom watercraft and swim to the beach. No one of us standing here blames you for being seduced by the once constant tingle of skin we've followed all our lives.

TIP TOP VACATION PERFORMANCE

Two women velcroed a husky, mesh tank top
in order to separate the men from the boys.
Then, 20 aisles apart, mimed the crucifixion.
Words I’m akin to grasp start in

"Today I Promise," "Rubric for Asparagus," and "My Life"