POETRY

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

The collective
failure
of ethical standards

Electric Eels, Finishing School, Teeth

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

Like dirt

this is what I want you to to see:
leaves falling because it is too late for them not to

Despairathon

You’ve spent a lifetime training
for this.

beach
On Undressing a Color / On Undressing a Girl

I imagine that undressing a color, though, would be so much like peeling a memory away from the grey and the white matter of your brain.

REVENGE SCENE

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.

Landscape with Ash

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

Dis Place Ment

People have always coped with flooding, and they learned to cope with death.

Lobster

I suffer visions and many indignities
while looking for the Lobster

woman at bar
After She Told Me You Pushed Her Down the Stairs

Empty vessels
make the most sound, I think,
as you rip the fairy lights off the handrail.

AUTOPSY REVEALS LASTING MARRIAGES MOSTLY COMPOSED OF SHARP METAL IN A THEORETICAL VACUUM

it’s touch-and-go with me and weddings

i do not want to wait until it’s too late

the strands of your hair on the bathroom tiles aren’t sketching defeat. that’s you spitting disease in the face with another day you’ve woken up to.

Welcome To The House of Static

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

Condolences

my friends’ fathers are
dropping
I mean dying
like flies

Unerased | Steep Steps

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

appetites

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

Observer of the Patient

Her brown eyes,
how a fig
considers itself.

The Man

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…

I could, even now, go down to the water

Even from this distance I could go out
the door it would bang shut and crumble

There is an alternative universe

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