It recommended
soft porn, as gentle prodding and petting parent
to parent might calm and soothe the kid.

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.

Winter sat like a wolf
on the horizon.

my friends’ fathers are
dropping
I mean dying
like flies

and then her eyes fully opened — blazed through with strands of mud

Ma wrings
a wet world
of colors

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

Listen to me: I know
the winter gloom in
mid-summer…

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

Now that the Israeli has left, it falls
on me to make the salad.

how does an afternoon turn
on its axis?

He has stories that I am not in
anymore. It’s healed this way.

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

you know that
baby swallows make silver ripples
in wild rivers to court reeds?

It is the 70s. 1970s? 2570s? Who knows?
Audre and I have a penthouse in New York.