Try not to see your own predicament in every fucking thing.

and apples, mackintosh mostly, but any kind left in The Pub
at the Assisted Living Place

My grandmother asked, “Does it feel like being widowed?”

If my life was the size of my arm, I would stretch it out for you.

love is a soggy tea stain on a grocery receipt

There is so little left of the tomato plants.

Ghosts for hire, whispers in her mouth,
cysts to feel, the symmetry of a gift.

Okay, picture this: We’re in an elevator. The elevator shuts down. It doesn’t matter where we’re going, only that we’re alone.

You let the yellow glow
from eye sockets. The building up the street
is burning faster and faster.

a folksome, gruesome opera
of gauze and malcontent.

here is the sky in stop motion, flickering,
a still shot in monochrome

Do not say anything anybody else has said ever. Things are not “bleached by sun.”

we drove on through
the blue seal of morning as the turbines
turned and winked out their hearts

Every so often, they add a tattoo
in honor of some long-forgotten love.

I want to roll in this moment until I become its vocabulary
until I smell like the bones
until I am its echo…

In my universe, my arm carries a heart and flowers,
my back a misguided quote

the man is stayed bent over the canvas
of my sofa. the man is me the man is him
self and I bring down the whip…