This is the most difficult sermon, / The one where the disciples / Burn the hamburger buns and / Christ nearly misses his train.

I grow our loneliness in my mouth, feed you— / sweet and bleak— under a halo of buzzing stars.

An interview with Anna Noyes

I am all the way turned on; turned up. Nerve-hiss-skin. There is a story here, and I am running interference.

First, he ARRIVED – like the swans at Capistrano, or aliens in the desert, or, more likely, a flaming dessert.

“Who is that?” my friend Noelle said, poking me in the ribs; her inflection, a

Dress Code

I’ve got this friend who’s passionate about dress codes. Her name is Sharon. Most of the jobs I’ve had, when it’s come time for a boss to enforce the dress code, they do so

Radio Tower, 4yrs old

The radio tower had big cones on top. We were in the car and I said to mom, “What are those?” She didn't know so she said, “Oh, that's where Mickey Mouse lives.” I was

Cave In
Album: Jupiter
Released: August 8, 2000
Hydra Head
Length: 44:10

My friend Beth was blamed for everything I ever did wrong. In my grandmother's eyes, it was all her fault.

texas was underwater, florida had been evacuated, and the eagle creek blaze—started by fireworks in September of the hottest Summer on record—filled the skies for hundreds of miles with the forest’s ashes.

A sister in place of a father wasn’t an exchange. I’d had twelve years with a father and none with a sister, and I’d preferred it that way.

The Gemini

It would be a lie to say I always went to bed with one brother
and woke up with another—that at night he placed pomegranate
 
seeds on my belly, making constellations on my

I sip red wine and weed / and deface anything that looks like me

People became a mob and the mob circled her, gnashed their teeth and lashed their arms as if to say, Dance! Dance! Dance! They wanted a concert! Another song! Dance, Connie, dance!

Tongue hasn’t left its .276 square foot efficiency studio apartment in three weeks. To discourage visitors due to lack of space, this space was rented. Tongue is going through a break-up. This

There Never Was a Mainland

We burned fast that summer. The boats had stopped coming. The water kept us there. That’s the thing about islands.

We bathed at low tide. We ate shells and weeds.

After I finished the reading, I waited a couple minutes, browsing books, until I left the bookstore - alone. All the women who’d watched me, who were so supportive, so attractive, were huddled in a group. They were friends, they were a community.

Thank you for calling that curiosity “innocent.”  I like the sense of “innocent" as “guileless,” rather than “not-guilty,” since the poems sketch both our ignorance and our complicity.  I

My sheets got dripped on. We didn’t finish all of it. I fell asleep with the taste of it dried around my lips. Sweet, for a little.

Chicken à la King

I bit. We bred a snoutless dog to lead
us to the prize. We groomed ourselves
with yearning floss. You swam
through scum in the retention pond
and called it flamenco.

Once upon a time there was no sex, but sex was everywhere: in Laura's 6th grade locker with her roll-on deodorant, in Dr. Davidson's walk—slow and tight-calved, in Mr. Robinson's guitar—Cat Steven's "Wild World" each afternoon before the bell, in Mrs. Roger's wavy, knee- length red hair—smelling of Wella Balsam and cigarettes.