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.

There were reports of a vagrant living in a bathhouse.

I don’t know if my husband and I are on the way to church or a hangover.

The bass line to “If I Was Your Girlfriend” curled into a smaller ball and pulled the thin blanket in tighter.

Tough to have a face / in the late weather of Empire.

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

The night we part, not knowing when we will see each other next, we go out walking beneath a swollen, but waning, moon.

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 cousin Anabella is almost 16. She’s into musical theatre. She posts pictures of froyo on her Instagram has four times more followers than me. Her favorite member of One Direction is Niall.

I'm the codebreaker from Lambchop-eating, Advanced, Crazy Spys. Or L.A.Z.Y.

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.

Are the woods still there? The woods were still almost there. 

The heavy moon’s already almost halved itself, the month’s almost passed. I saw

a cat huddled, early this morning, by a

after vomiting
a small order of
onion rings and
chicken fries
from burger king

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

Jokes for People Who Had Good Fathers

Something about rock and roll music
and leaf blowing,              yard work

Dads who speak in puns and are called
Dad, probably but not

It’s also the story of a horse, which is a word but also a kind of animal.

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

It was tiny, the prefab. A neat little one-room bungalow with a kitchenette along one wall and a tiny separate bathroom and the saleswoman told Greg that, in a pinch, he could move in as soon as it was delivered.

All I wanted to do was tell some jokes at an open mic and look what I had to go through. I was running for my life.

Forkful of Artichoke

He thinks I can will myself to love him,
when I know love as a species of hunger.
I know the heart, like the stomach
cannot will itself to appetite.
Rum-drunk,

 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. 

Did it bother him that his only erotic recourse that evening would be to pretend masterpiece on her face? Yes. 

The Noah Cicero who answered Juliet Escoria’s questions, he is already gone and to take it farther he wasn’t even there before he answered the questions. The Noah Cicero that answered the questions was only that Noah Cicero.