washing the wound
in beer and poetry

Look, you smile too much or too little, both at the wrong times, and people don’t like you.  

Yellow 1 & 2

I will no longer keep you; I will remember you yellow

you have a beautiful yellow
ache, a scarf made of heavy eyelashes.
I keep you tucked in my backpack among
other

We turned off the game and drove to the mountains, a dead dog in the backseat

And she doesn’t know a word of German, except “bier.”

One day I came across an inverted map of the Western Hemisphere. Cape Horn was in Alaska's usual position. I felt very disturbed, like air was flooding into the space above North America and

love becoming, like an apple,
this requires time, starred
blossom, then summer, the attention
of bees, grown men
bow their heads, concentrating
on the national anthem
in stadiums

After watching the TEDx Talk, I initially thought, “I wonder if everyone who watches that video will try to write a memoir.”

You write a book with three parts. Sure, a few critics come down hard, but mostly the book is appreciated.

[practice breathing, talk to snakes, how to suck venom from a wound]

     -february 3, 2012: “I’m getting better at branching out”

I want as a reader to be transformed and thrown off balance by what I read, and I try to do that for my reader as well.

I definitely gained traction in my twenty-ninth year. At twenty-nine, my skin cleared up, I sold a book. But the biggest accomplishment for me was that I stopped working retail and made my money solely from writing and teaching writing.

The rock is slow to change. The wave can be exploded by a breeze.

When I lived in Michigan, I ruined baseball. I recorded every Detroit Tigers game only to fast-forward between pitches, so I could get back to stacks of paper grading, so I could be as productive

Midway through the school year one of the kids in one of the other sixth grade classes hung himself, so we couldn’t call the game we played in the mornings ‘suicide’ after that. 

I would go back now, though, live in the nervous fidget
before I said I like you & kissed her braces
with my upper lip & bled all over her teeth.

It was the summer of Monica Lewinsky and Mark McGwire and Armageddon. I was on a short business trip to Philadelphia—a handholding, as it is known in the office. I was sent, via Amtrak, to coddle

When I first met Dawn, I didn’t know what a lexicographer was. I had to look it up. Later I admitted I hadn’t even realized that people still made dictionaries.

“Of course they do,” Dawn

Much has been said about that smile. I'm not in the business of describing smiles.

Let’s start this account of fuckfaces on October 18, 2006. I was 30 years old, recently engaged, in my third year of residency training at Chapel Hill, and depressed about the New York Mets.