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,