burrow

you traced along the freckles on my back
with black ink,
like a crumpled constellation

i looked at the picture and smiled,
like a lonesome girl reading her diary aloud to an

I dreamt about walking around Ikea by myself and buying a lime green ice cube tray. I drive to the post office and pick out a large flat rate shipping box. I put the ice cube tray inside and I

Tritina: Die

Our lives, the lyrics of ‘Die! Die! Die!’
Less the scenes in Die Hard or Die! Die!
My Darling! or Juliet Montague’s “when he shall die,”

The way we feel when the

After a couple of Martinis, // one may regard oneself pleasantly pixelated. / I cure nerves with a ten-hour Netflix binge, // then curve my vertebrae to you / while our phones update.

The value of a cash gift is on its face, and that, in some circles, is the value of the giver.  But excuse me, the value of a $130 vegetable peeler is $5.99.

Have you traveled abroad?  I’m sure

comic by Oliver Bendorf

EVERY DAY IS SUNDAY

I go to call her for the ribs recipe but then I think how she doesn't respond to my jokes so I go to text her instead. And what I say goes like this: you used to make

Dear Sir or Madam,

I feel I need to begin by saying I am a longtime lover of your products. As a single mom some days after my shift I know I can stop by and acquire a good amount of your

She was The Incorruptible, so named by a senior during the most grueling AP World semester ever. “Just one night off, Ms. L,” whined star student Jasmine, comically sliding halfway to the

At the diner, when David has been allowed to order a cup of coffee and become a thinking person again, he will begin to attempt to isolate the exact point in time when he decided to leave his wife.

Where Everywhere Snow, There Grass

There was a patch of grass. There was snow
around the patch of grass. There was me.
I am not about the snow; the snow is not about
me. Although

In first grade

we had to make
a little booklet
about our dads.

You take a sheet
of paper, fold it
fold it again

and then draw
a picture
on every page.

Well, on the

George Strait’s in this poem now, he’s meddling
with everything.  He’s reading words
with the wrong inflections, making me older
than I know how to be. He wants Texas in here;
[defend

He slides an open palm up and down wallpaper that appears to depict horsemen and battalions in battle. He presses an ear to it. He tilts a framed print of Caravaggio’s Holofernes away from the wall.

I turned my head so fast / I mistook the moon / for a firework / and then I wanted // to bark too...

Daniel heard it driving home...

Encore

He got a nice new haircut. His laryngitis was gone. His heart hurt less and the same with his head. His surgical scars had healed. He felt like food again. Strangely, the older and

When Homer went blind, Langley’s remedy was one hundred oranges a week.

Pingo went first. He always did. The rest of us stood at the top of the slope over the place where the sewer pipes from town spilled into the narrow creek that  disappeared into a deep ravine west

Things they never tell you when your husband leaves the planet:

It’ll happen faster in real-life than it does on TV. 10, 9, 8… A flash of orange and a shimmer of exhaust, and the shuttle is