Every day after your aunt points a 9mm Smith and Wesson at your head, you think about holding one in your hands. You need to feel that weight. 

She wasn’t a real pretty girl, but it was Valentine’s and a Saturday night and we had booze.

We were in Hungary to see his grave, which I did not spit on, and I’m proud of myself for that.   

We are going to die still falling // for crap about berries, a glass of red wine. It could be worse.  We’re not suicidal, / smack fiends, Swazi.

At night, when everyone's gone, the dark looks like a scatter of tiny bullet holes above her desk in the shape of a heart.

Excise it.  Use a cheese wire . . . 

My man shocked me by pulling out dirty magazines with pictures of fat black women called Black Tail. He had had the mags concealed in an oversize manila envelope.

The Germans call it the downfall. The French call it sleep. The Polish just give you vague directions.

I wear glasses now, Luis,
you wouldn’t even recognize me.

 I looked down and saw, in place of the disorder there had been, the penis and testicles of a small boy sprouting from me, growing incrementally as I ran, at about the rate of one year per second. 

Coincidentally, I read the third book of My Struggle in the two weeks leading up to my daughter’s third birthday. The coincidence is that my daughter was experimenting with a particularly annoying

Space Suit

I fell asleep in my space suit again. I know this is out of hand, but the moon is getting a bad name, and there are men out there who need me to be an example of how to treat the

Babies from the Dry Counties became a fated élite. From the creamiest of breasts to organic kale pudding and Montessori kindergarten.

I.

When I was a kid I believed
in good old-fashioned animistic
souls coming out of the grass
and the sky and the rocks. 

I loved walking
in Las Rocas de Santo Domingo
and seeing

Why are your TEETH YELLOW?

I Have

I have a
wet mouth
in this pink
apartment.

I still have that.

Boy—
you think we’re in love?

Don’t you
roughhouse
with me.

You’re trying.
But at this

15 October

The daytime moon is halved in a bright blue sky and a confusion of birds flows together and apart again over the English/Philosophy building, evading a hawk—this is the feast day of

Ask her to aim her index fingers.
at you. Aim yours.

Present the conflict or the mother as the conflict or the mother as the object of conflict during childhood.

In elementary school, when kids talked about being “Christian,” I thought they were talking about race.