The final weekend of January I boarded a plane to Seattle to see, for the first time, a man I had met on a kink website. Or, as I had considered multiple times over the last two months during which we

The homing pigeon / of misery / is my baby mama's / text message.

I could hear the usual blues music booming from Ryan’s garage as I got off my bike in the driveway, sweating through my Smoothie King uniform. Ryan’s dad had started and quit three blues bands in the

Uncle Dale says, “We’re lucky that none of us can fly.”

He was only Jack. Never daddy.

In late July, in the mid-nineties, I begged Mom and her fiancé Paul to buy me a big ball at Roses department store.

I'm sure a terrible something has occurred at every inhabitable coordinate. 

There was a week when my grandma was gone, I had the whole place to myself, was drinking the regular Coca Cola classic and the half sized baby Coca Cola and brought the Abercrombie pictures out in the open on the second floor. I meditated.

This final image crushed me. It was a forewarning of what identity destruction can lead to if we
don’t truly understand ourselves to begin with.

I hold myself in the plank position. The little dog sits on the rug watching. It’s a very expensive rug. She’s not supposed to be here. He’s up on the purple couch and I do not know what he is

I first saw Todd Field’s Tár in a packed theatre in Bloomfield Township, Michigan with a crowd
of mostly middle-aged and above upper to upper-middle class New Yorker-tote-bag liberal types.
During the first 20 or so minutes of the film I found myself annoyed, fidgeting in my seat and
groaning as I sat through the titular EGOT winner’s conversation with Adam Gopnick.

i ask if i could be june
my birth month he says all days any days
for a smile like mine

You might be reluctant to try liver mush. You might think it’s not for me. But you are at a party, and you’ve been cornered by a stranger, and there’s nobody else there you really want to talk to, and

There is one boat out every day.
We are never packed in time to take it.

Under the ribs, between the lungs, where no periscope lives
to view the damage of long nights spent in cold underpasses...

For the first time ever, they were being honest about their sex lives.

He wondered, "What if I never get out of the shower?" and just like that he never did.

I smile now, waiting, always waiting, for you to reappear and remember me ...

One night of nothing

When the languorous motion of bats and owls overthrows the scorching August air
making a party only takes three

One night of nothing
heavy      on an empty

Margot and I had humped once, too, when I stopped by and Andrea wasn’t home.

1.

And they all lived happily ever after. 

2.

Finishing work on the Saturday and heading to the pub because that’s what we always did. Tall Paul and small Paul and (ordinary) Paul, Ian, Bel,

I confess my DIY rituals in high school, tiny fires fueled by crumpled notes and dried flowers from lost loves and later, gifts from my parents bought during the divorce. In the smoke, my hope conceived visions: sometimes revenge, always return. Nothing I witnessed was more than smoke

Everything that could have possibly budged already had, anything neglectable was long ago done so.

Color Study, or Ode to Discomfort

It was never safe for us—
always beneath the eye is blood;
and maybe a ferocious tongue
called

They walked along the railroad somewhere in Atlanta on a cold and bitter night, the full moon above them like a yellow coin some unforgiving God had tossed far out into the galaxy. In the near

One evening when I was fifteen, back in 2009, my ballet teacher arrived at the studio wearing a shit-eating grin. Jeff loved to gossip, and he spoke with a showy Southern twang that made the juice of every secret dribble down our fingers.

Bible | Vers

Top to Bottom | scan my profile | For Christ’s Sake | Sing Jesus’ Name | I gospel & apostle | Book of Vers | My rural bottom’s up | My crop /top | down along the road | a hym(n) in

I was standing in line for a movie and a movie played in my head.
I was standing in line for a movie and the movie I was waiting to see strode through the lobby and out the front door.
I was

When he wasn't looking / I snuck / a spoonful...

Of course, Jesus only had hyssop—a bitter wine on a wet sponge—during the passion, but that was not an option at the concession stand.

Soon sunlight would be replaced by nighttime.  I felt this, the same way my grandma could feel the rain coming on.  

He watched the door, and saw that it wanted to open.

I remember playing some songs at four in the morning and asking if you liked them. What the songs sounded like doesn’t matter now. I only knew a little about songs back then but I know a bit more

"Unlikely to Condemn" and "Different Circumstances"

From the long wooden balcony, from the house that overlooks a forest that is almost bluegreen in springtime and a witchy red during the fall, the snow slants through the trees like a new

geometry,

Naoko knew all too well how difficult it was to imbibe the air of a foreign culture. She had matriculated for a year at the University of Santa Barbara to study saxophone and marked each day as a progression from one shameful moment to the next.

Roxane Gay took me out to dinner five years ago. It was Roxane, Ashley C. Ford and me. We were in Indianapolis and it was the first time I'd met either of them. I remember thinking wow this is one

OUTLAW LOVE

I can listen to “Thirteen” by Big Star and pretend
I am thirteen back in my flamingo
bedroom and a boy
would come to my

She almost said yes until she saw the stain.

The one and only time I saw Herman French naked was when he was toweling off after a shower.  Herman was my bunkmate two years ago at Camp Thunderbird.  He had the smallest penis I’d ever seen. 

Luke walks that line inbetween doing his booty-shaking and grinding on stage and also seeming like your “cool” youth pastor and that's not a knock. I love Luke Bryan and there's something about him that seems so genuine and sweet, I can't even picture him being fussy or rude with anyone.

Destiny's Child third album track # 1 she plays as if I don't already know what’s up. She just wants me to remind her she's a queen so I play Coming to America, and we're okay for a few more years.

Bro Country is not all that different from dudes in general and real life. I've dated enough white dudes and went to college in Kentucky and I've been to, like, twenty-five Dave Matthews Band concerts, so, trust me, I know this stuff.

I had runoff all over. I hadn’t escaped the heartland.

“But what if it isn’t broken? What if this is the way it’s supposed to be? Like, a new challenge that keeps things interesting. Something unexplainable that helps.”

MY FATHER PLAYS SONGS TO THE MOON, MY SON PLAYS SONGS TO THE MOON

An absence surrounds the cabin; an absence haunts it.

My father sits inside, playing sad songs to the evening on his own

Those birds swept down with great urgency, talons punching the water, tearing into fish flesh, sometimes with a force that cut the salmon in two.

Win wasn't homeless, which set him apart from the others. But he'd hit rock-bottom, jobless and sharing enough to be one among them. In the fifty-station clinic, they were strapped to centrifuge

I want to spank Diane Sawyer
In fact, I'd pay upwards of
fifty dollars for it, at least
if she was wearing white cotton
panties

In my fantasy
I wonder
I stop and ask,
"Is

Ars Poetica

I want to say this
simply: I was out
near the river; the trees
were bare, and would be.
I saw no blacksnake
in the undergrowth,
but that doesn’t mean
it wasn’t there,

On the last day of her life, my grandmother woke up, went into the bathroom to brush her teeth, and looked into the mirror to discover that she was bald. Oh! she said. That's a fright. This

I am a fifty foot and two inch panda monster. It’s time for my sacrifice. If it’s not there, then it’s time to rampage through the village. I live out in the woods, a deep ancient forest, trees

Outside on his porch was an indoor sofa. But he kept the lawn mowed. Early in the morning when the grass was still too wet — there he was, limping behind the mower, cursing God and us when it

The winter I turned twenty-seven, I followed a woman who said she might love me to a small town in Northwest Pennsylvania, a go-between place that provided me with little comfort, except maybe to

The guy at table six wiggled his fingers. “Mind if I asked a personal question?”

“Go ahead,” said Miranda, reaching for the check. He was going to anyway.

Table Six grinned. His sunburned

Dave wondered what had happened to the TV.
 

He had faraway memories of nature programs, black and white comedians with European accents and harshly lit news programs with stories as stark as