Previously on...
Part 2  ||  Part 1  ||  Prologue

By the time he’d arrived at the Atwell Park Summer Solstice Festival, Bill Hannan was so high he mistook one of the paper lanterns hanging from the red-lit oak tree at the center of the park for the moon. 

salat to define the terms of ritual

               [adhan]

A calling, a culling, a billowing
minaret banner, a cigarette starter thrown
out a moving car window to prove a point.

"with sky as ceiling, / ground as home, / we can call the stranger / lover / and the earth / ours / at least for a little while." 

I dreamed we were in a department store trying to buy you shoes.

This was months ago. April, maybe May. The weather was foggy. So was my brain. I saw you again in the Cubism section. I was standing in front of “The Actor” by Picasso. The second I saw you, I smiled

Take a percocet at around 4:30pm.

Eat a large weed cookie, drink 1 750ml can of beer and then 3 pints between 6:30pm and 10:00pm.

"You won’t let me love you, so I am loving this plant,” he says.

We do Christmas Eve at our mom’s.

People used to tell my father they looked alike, he and Bruce, and I suppose it was true.

Betty's son Jonah is convulsing in the kitchen and there are fifty ways he could die.

My Brother’s Two Screams 

I heard two screams from my bedroom. Outside,
my brother had killed his best friend. That day 
the clouds stayed put. The trees swayed under 
gentle winds, but not

NAME LIKE A GIRL

I am a girl named older. I get in the way
of my own sleeping. Not being average
like that house, full of triangular
objects, where I only know two
animals, a fish and a

I tried to write a warning
                            in chaste trees and pumpkin vines:
the worst men of our lives will return 
                to us in more ways than one.

Preordained,

He tells me I have a lot of fear. He tells me I have a lot of hurt. He says someone really did a number on me, that I’m a really hurt person. 

Chōshū

In the courtyard, 
1867. 
The last heir,

black-haired and naked
before dawn; 
winter 

starlight through the bare 
branches of the banyan 
fucking whistling—

he’s opened

You preheat your oven to 425°F before measuring out two and one third cups of self-rising flour into a glass Pyrex bowl. White Lily is the best though it can be hard to find outside of the south and is worth tracking down. It’s milled from a soft winter wheat, and with it your biscuits puff up into soft, light pillows that literally melt in your mouth.

I was in my third year of high school and I felt apocalyptic. Mine was a violent kind of nihilism. I spent a lot of time seething.

here is my chest here is where I remember longing has not visited me in a long time longing who I let inside me longing who I let cut my hair with old scissors longing who feels my feet swell and

                     for virginia

I threw in an extra fuck because it’s spring

I threw in an extra fuck because the long before is here

I threw in an extra fuck because the riveting scene is

"He’s trying to tell you that he’s cool,” Jay said. “He’d probably buy us beer.”

Every twenty-something in Los Angeles has a comedian friend. In late winter, mine invited me to his show in Culver City with a foolproof pitch: no cover, no drink minimum, nearby parking.

Ghosts remove fishhooks from animal bodies
in the desolation outside an empty house.

Somewhere between a fortress & forest
cicadas shed skin & leave exoskeletons

on tree barks.

I guess Steve felt if we were "together-together," I'd watch every film he liked, hang on his every word, which I didn't even do for my husband who wasn't passionate about anything.

There’s no room that’s mine. This thought occurred to me plenty as a child, but it was a fact without any emotion attached. I think about it especially when I watch house hunting shows: what a wish list looks like for people who get to choose where they live on purpose.

The first time a boy accidently touches your leg you are fourteen—