There’s always a man, somewhere, taking out the trash, his light blue jeans rolled above his ankles; waving at his elderly neighbor watering her tomato plants; picking up the morning paper and
Why are we so very unwanted, but somehow always wanted by the worst of things?
sour
i wanted
in the way
that want follows
bedraggled
a half moon
of bites
it starts
like this
slowly
rara saw
FIRE FIRE
in my eyes
hard to describe
to you who
no longer
The first time I went rock climbing, I lasted 30 minutes.
“Here’s the thing. You can’t be doing this. You’re 38 years old. You’re a compulsive liar. You have cavernous molars. And you’re already being tailed by the police.”
On Shaving my Legs for the First Time
the offending hairs that sprout from dark skin
like unwelcome ants that toil through the night
hairs that signal virility on my father’s chin
draw taunts
We listened to the fathers sitting on the front porch of Hurd’s, smoking cigarettes and talking baseball until sundown. It was our one final glimpse of our world before it was rebuilt.
It was late, and he’d roll out of the parking lot and speed down the hill, sliding through winding backstreets with no streetlights, careening all over the road like he thought us coming face-to-face with death would make me feel better about working at Walmart.
an immigrant love letter
this is a love letter
to jasmine rice and soy sauce in the ethnic aisle to the crisp
melting of duck skin in my mouth you taste the
I smile now, waiting, always waiting, for you to reappear and remember me ...
My wife and I are in pretty deep with the Mac. You can tell because we call them "the Mac."
I WRITE PANIC
into the locked kitchen
cabinet, china chipped
& sticky. i write
myself into a bottle
of vodka, sloshing
in waves of bitter
padded tongue.
i write the morning
green &
I once let the person I loved prick my ribcage with a needle a thousand times so I wouldn’t forget. A collection of dots arcing messily into two black brackets.
My mother wouldn’t let her get a pet tarantula, despite many tantrums, so instead she played with whatever bugs crawled around the house.
Clark says that trying to save the mussels is dumb because there are so many of them. That’s his logic. The town says they have to repair the dam in the lake, or the houses down the way will flood
immediately I thought, “Oh shit! They got Kanye!”
words to describe love
saw a pretty plant through a store window
picked out a different one instead
that
I am writing you now from a city we scored with nomadic walking fourteen months ago. During that trip I had been ill.
There were no ornaments for the tree but there was beer.
One night of nothing
When the languorous motion of bats and owls overthrows the scorching August air
making a party only takes three
One night of nothing
heavy on an empty
Dan disowned my sister and me via email a year ago
In this dappled language, like a woods painted by Neil Welliver, in and out of our attention, animals wander in the camouflage. They are highlighted by our attention: each stands in a yellow bar of
