An immigrant from the Russian Empire invented jeans...

I knew you'd come undone...

"By the Seashore" and "The Return"

"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.