POETRY

“Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.”
—Rita Dove
appetites

you quit wearing pants
loaf around your yard
in hole-nipped panties

You can’t make them love you, no matter how artfully you betray yourself

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

The State School 1984 His Given Name Was Wilbur  We Called Him Magpie

Mostly he ate what was put on his plate
snuck coffee grounds or dirt for a snack
Once a zipper Unzipped

A Beautiful Thing

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

Time Travel

I count my homes—
those of my scattered youth
the sanctuary of our young family
the intermittent rest stops
of apartments and vacations.

Vase

The storm passes without snow.
The car waits loyally in the back lot.

Lobster

I suffer visions and many indignities
while looking for the Lobster

First

Long after midnight, we’re talking about our first time

Aging Punks

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

Electric Eels, Finishing School, Teeth

Millions of Americans have been affected by identity theft. It’s probably the greenhouse gases.

if detritus is all i’m made up of

my love is a glass shard, a knife made of madness and moonlight,
and there are already way too many fragments in this house

Back Suplex

Gravel-scatted hell &
we were blessed to be able
to hold on for even a heartbeat

Unerased | Steep Steps

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

Condolences

my friends’ fathers are
dropping
I mean dying
like flies

Pit Stop in Kansas

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

Getting Postcards From a Piano Showroom

The two of us toast to a man we both love, to whatever degree, clink our glasses and laugh…

Landscape with Ash

You are strange, my mother said, dwelling on the past.