I still want to spin someone like a record, baby, round round round round.

I’m a mineralogist now,

I tell Jake, as I show him my crystals
all neatly displayed in boxes. It makes

me feel like a scientist. But I use
the crystals to cure the bad things in my

life, to

At the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, I browse the gift shop. It’s scented lavender from a leg-shaped diffuser in the corner.

My last suicide attempt was in a park called Jesus Green. I said ‘last’ because I gave up, not because it worked. Writing plays tricks with life and death so you need to make things clear.

I’m Writing from the Other Side of the Universe to Ask You How the Weather Is

This is a soft rain, my father says, his forehead a creased encyclopedia page. It is mao mao yu in Chinese, syllables

Seventeen days since you spoke your last words to me. They repeat themselves in my mind, I never want to forget them.

Song for 2 Phones

     What is that?
The line outside
the Maria Bamford standup
we went to last year.
          Send it to me.
     What is that?
A sugar maple on the hill
shedding Gatorade

I am not a pinch, a spoonful, a half a cup of light rivering down into the stomach where, I should know, the heart truly resides.

George Simmons used to sling crack on 42nd St.—why his uptown boys always called him The Midtown Turn. Now he’s 54—and everybody calls him Pop. He’s been running the streets for decades. “The streets

I didn’t turn around because I wasn’t entirely sure my name was being called and even so there was no one I wanted to talk to on the street in the middle of this particular Tuesday.

Traffic

It’s 60 degrees in January so the birds have decided to just stick it out because who can afford the time-share anyway and the flowers bloom completely off-key like the conductor is drunk

The first time I was shot I was fifteen and I deserved it. I broke into a run-down lurch, an ancient moonshiners' abandoned cabin in the forest.

It had been a long frustrating day, but at least he was now bathing in a bowl of milk.

And yet, and yet, from the rear pew of my mind came a rude slurping as my straw probed the ice of a Pepsi.

my parents drive around our home city, in the off-season, looking for fresh durian, durian which my brother and I think smells like

(i) death

(ii) shit

(iii) those fetid socks at the bottom of our school bags

Dear Casey Kasem. The body chocolates

rims itself in melt. This does not matter. You have made voice the only magic. the only way to cast a spell. Maybe that’s why I’m bored with witches. with

We get back together, because of course we do. He is better, now. Therapy helps both of us.

Isolation Cento

eating the leftover snow
we speak a shadow-speech
from room to room closing lights
very-stars
rush with a crackling sound over
a lake
and there is so much here
to last us all

Dan texted his wife before going on the ventilator. She shares most things on Facebook, and she has disclosed this last message, too.

Consideration of Deferred Action for Chilhood Arrivals

This is when your humanity ends, when a pen hits this paper.

Since my mom died after my second wedding, I don't have anyone to tell me if my mustache is showing.

You held your mouth open but kept crying, the bread going soggy in your palm, your communion taken in vein because of course you were always the body and the blood.

...I'm part of this thing where fish learned to walk...

"poem w/ dukes up" and "facefaceface"

My grandfather drives me up to Sarah Lawrence choking back tears. As soon as he leaves, I cut off my earlocks in the bathroom and change into Outside World clothing.

This spring was cloudy + wet so the world is green, green, green.