Quarantine (March 17, 2020)

Through the west wall
our neighbors still
decide to get drunk.

You go into the basement,
pull out a red bag–
hammer and nails.

Framed photo of your

So I wanted to bang this exvangelical guy and it's about to get worse:

After last night, I’m no longer allowed at The Mint Bar. You could say it’s because I choked the owner’s daughter up against the wall next to the jukebox that only plays Cash songs—pushed her hard enough that a quarter fell from the coin slot—or you could say she deserved it.

Is it weird to call Dave Housley the “Uncle” of lit mags? He’s that guy, the writer/editor/generally amazing human that everyone in the literary world seems to know. Dave is one of the original

A Perfect Pitch

Throwing under-handed
his fastball started curving
over home plate
so I swung at the pitch
and bought the bat for my son
which was too heavy for him
in his first little league

We are a thousand couples. A million maybe.

I’m in accounting. Sally in the lab. Among her other duties, Sally is an odor judge. Her nose is rather ordinary to look at, what my grandma might have called a button nose. But Sally’s nose is legend.

Dream Vision of Frank O’Hara

    it is 4:40 and I’m drenched in moonstone, sequins, fishnets, and general getting-out
    of-bedness at the corner of 11th Avenue and 30th hoping for something

The man wearing a Ray Lewis jersey doesn’t know who Ray Lewis is.

Just another dead body in a city of dead bodies, right? This world is out to eat me, Chase. I feel the scratch of its teeth.

We beat Brock Shamos every day. We beat him with jump ropes we stole from Mr. Randall’s P.E. class

KISS ME THRU THE PHONE

trembling     string between two cans
     across town     fry-gravel longing compressed      voice-tightrope
transposed, delivered to you     I don't know how it happens-

I stand in the aisle, electrified, and wait for the dead objects to speak to me.

FOMO

It’s hard to look back
when your neck is pressed
against a wall of ignorance and bliss

I don’t know my history
‘cause I didn’t see it happen

I guess it was
during the bathroom

We are always looking for something to cure us of the pain of being made of fallible meat.

The Chetrams were from Trinidad and listened to Bollywood music on the weekends. They were good, hardworking people. Their kids were polite. They were not Muslims as far as their neighbors could tell, since Chetram liked Miller Lite and the daughter wore high-waisted shorts in the summer. It was not polite to inquire.

Transpacific Passage through my Hungers

I wake up famished
after dreaming of my Halmuni.
Her sturdy hands spooning galbijjim
into wooden bowls. At first light, I Godzilla
Google maps for every

The first time I went to Paris, I was seventeen and stayed with a man who was thirty-three, Sylvain.

Joe’s uncle bought rain barrels and fertilizer. A.J.’s dad emptied the family checking account, $300 at a time, from the Circle K where he bought cartons of cigarettes, where my brother was robbed at

My child could draw that.

Adam and Deb’s kid— Jonathan— is standing center stage, looking out at the crowd and desperately trying to remember his next line. It’s probably his first play, unlike my little Lucy. She did her time

I am the only enemy now.

So Mom didn’t come with us to the grocery
store, but she insisted when a box of Grape Nuts
or Popsicles tasted off it was because we hadn’t
selected the box behind the first, that hiding
in the

I walk the empty lot behind it gathering creosote to make a salve. I say empty, but that is only out of convention.

After the earth becomes a brutalist’s wet concrete dream...

It sat in my wallet while I made out with a guy during the “Josie and the Pussycats” movie