six years later and I only know how to be needed

Call me sensitive but if you dealt with a toothache
that made a destroyed country out of the left side
of your face, wouldn’t you cry your ass off

“The organism is made to self-regenerate,” she said as we walked to my 1980 Buick in the gravel lot.  “In this way it is unlike worn-out horses and old-ass cars.”

I am thinking about the lungfish’s two worlds—the wet one and the dry one—and about metamorphosis.  And I am thinking about strokes—about whether it’s the moment that the arm becomes weak that a person’s life goes into pause.  Or the moment that the blind spot sets in.

Now our privates got a timeline.

we’re all alone in our corner of need.

It’s customary in Italy to have food during happy hour. I ordered white wine but was nervous to ask for a plate. When I don’t understand what someone is saying I will just say no.

Latvia’s Baltic coastline is almost completely undeveloped except for a few fishing villages and some dilapidated concrete resorts for Communist Party officials.  A forest of black pines begins right at the edge of sixty-foot dunes.

Let’s touch hands across the rubble.

A person in a pool of water
drinks it all up.

Because Math! 

she had dreamt she had fed herself to tigers

felt their maw drag her by the neck

wondered nothing more of her life

other than how many calories she would be.

Snakes and Sharks and Bats

In  a dream you were chewing your fingers down to the knuckle. My fingers, missing nothing, seem a kind of bloom, fluid as they slide through my mouth and the mouths of others. Sometimes I

Here we are like we used to be,
my thinking of you, your eyes
slipping, never quite on me.

The program started with Take Your Kid to Work Day. We were pioneers in the field of crime scene investigation. Everything went smoothly as long as the kids didn’t touch anything. They’ve got eyes

a text msg that was sent:

ur hands my hands
both needed if i hit
u first would u hit me back

Seen two hours after I fell in love with you

the text msg that needed 2 be

1. She told him to shut the window-slats. Every shred of light should be brushed away. She wanted to feel invisible.

From Osama Bin Laden to the WNBA, Jordan Castro and friends explore who/what has sauce, and who/what doesn't.

The house

is new, but these woods are

strange, endless, and ancient.

around you because
I want you to keep thinking of me
as a small body, to wonder what keeps me
so pale, what sustains my Spanish mouth.

Don't ask me what I need,
for

Wasn’t this, after all, why she’d come out here in the first place? To find something special? 

This is not beautiful because this is not beautiful.

I meet a girl on OK Cupid and the first date goes well enough.

And now, as summer ends
and the days spread thin,
I feel my life like a meal,
not a bad meal, but one
I have eaten too many times.

[Previously on... Part 2 ::  Part 1]