I’ll Always Make Love to the Mississippi.

We bruised
my knees on the bluff.

I’ve disappeared into the current
of loving nothing
but tainted water lapping against rotten fish
against a rocky

When They Let Them Bleed: Ten Years After

It took me a long time to write “When They Let Them Bleed” – both in the practical sense, in that I recall writing it in very short bursts because it was

i felt you were floating now with them, in a bubble in space, the bubble has a name, ecstasy, keta, speed, coke, that’s the name of the bubble.

For the better part of every year I try like heck to be a better person. Nicer. More caring. This year I’ve taken up breathing. I breathe in and I breathe out each day. Last year I learned to put less

I was about to witness Kershaw’s first career no-hitter on TV when pieces of meat started to pour from the skies and slap the ground. Our house rattled as we rushed to the windows and watched the

A Hopeful Young Man on a Job Interview

I’m broke and eating chocolate ice cream out of a novelty helmet
I’m sweating because I’m wearing a sweater in the heat
to cover up the insane poison ivy on

1. There is a protective radius of ten feet on all sides of me.
2. I only know the name of one person in this room.
3. My body hair was groomed solely for this moment.

In Praise of Hands

I miss hands. I miss their flimsy, awkward quality –

the way one looks when offered while still searching

for a reason. I miss being young, lining up after the

You are standing on an indifferent platform in Preston Station and a little black spaniel is making unbreaking eye-contact with you as he pisses on your leg.

Maybe you didn’t recognize me, me with longer hair, growing tits, a new name.

She was going up to Poughkeepsie to see a girl she had met on the internet who, promisingly, shared her passion for Gary Larson comics.

Two men smoking cigarettes on Bleecker could mean anything
to each other.

Fifteen years before my autism diagnosis - the year I chopped off all my hair with jagged scissors - I hid a not inconsequential baggie of hash in my dorm room closet. I was, as always, trying to

Do you remember the names of everyone you swallow

Here’s the plan: we’ll become high-class prostitutes. “Courtesans,” I say, “like ancient Greece.”

Jay arrived once a week, every week, for sex. He was a dental student, worked  Wednesdays at a clinic near my house so it was easy for him to call to see if I was free. I made sure that I was. He

tree tree tree tree calvin calv hobbes

I know that I should be sad, or at least look sad, or somber, as I go through the things in Johnny’s room.

A man was arrested for creating a labyrinth in an IKEA.

doesn’t know how to give a PROPER blowjob
The spittle
of the sea
                        otherwise known as Jamaica Pond
dries hard on her eros:erring:elbow still deeper
resonating
in her