By now I have learned that sometimes, as Tricia pummels away at the backs of my thighs, I can tolerate a memory or two of George.

the water's instant when still...

There was a yearning in me for her soft whiteness, which went powdery pink in her most private of places.

I want to be remembered like this: taut...

Under what circumstances do we find ourselves here?

“Yvonne?” she called out. 

"Brooklyn Roof" and "Querying"

when encountering the duckrabbit ... 

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. 

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

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.

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. 

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.

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

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.