if we could remember how they built windows
before rain if
woman says sorry her shoes are so loud in the dryer.
reminds girl of a shaking bed.
The cedars of Lebanon are ziggurats. Many had been opened, years before, by lightning, and resembled hands, in fists, out of which flourished sagacious bouquets of the cedars of Lebanon.
We were in the space between the moon and childhood,
and it was a miracle to belong there, capable of lingering
I hold the knife // point up // & lean over // & beg gravity // to bring me down // gravity disappoints
The world perspires
Perpendicular to the daffodils
but I can spin around and around
if I start to lose it.
Lilith arrived not knowing if she was waking up chained to a 30-year-old farmer who was just born, a murderer on a feedback loop, or a Technogod asking to be argued with
A sun has a stomach.
dragging Virginia Slim through coral lipstick scrubbing
Hail Marys til they ignite your grandmother’s rosary
her nylon stockings torn at the nape of what haunts
who could it tell
that I had paid attention
(devotion as a currency again)
A tree grows through the glass coach
partially buried in someone’s front yard pachysandra.
Aux fauteuils de la Fille Sellette
One of the best skills to have is cooking, then repairing your own house then your own car.
Keats’s odes, for example, are different kinds of objects now than they were in 1819 and will continue to be different for future readers, if there are any. Perhaps they will be forgotten; this conjecture is not an unalloyed tragedy.
There is no time. Our houses
concealed, like songs, mumble to themselves
The darkness of that mirror, which is not quite equal to the darkness and silence inside the opened mouth of someone drowning in the Mediterranean, right now.
The more severe the loss, the brighter the arrangement.
you enjoy being judged
as stiff as the larynx
Because I was full of scandent pangs, livid wisteria.
And at every familiar street corner, for that matter, bursts
of small flowers rose up me like reflux.
The audience coos. The bartender
waits for you to stop talking.
Dashing themselves over the wet blade
Of night in Ohio
pressure me at
all costs
sudden dawn sky
chainlinked with
stars
Don’t ask for anything.
Great-horned aurochs have vanished
Forces
having jumped
their hoops
These days you can’t help but think every phone call’s a psycho
and not pay the bills that come in.
It is as common to think that redistribution of wealth is the mark of Satan, as it is to think that redistribution of one’s assets will mean we keep the house and all the pension benefits.
A man dancing and singing on the ramparts may be passing military secrets to the besiegers, or confident that the supplies within the castle walls will last a thousand years.
black & lusty seas – you rarely remember your
myriad defeats at the hands of drugs or booze
Wisdom resolved its compact of dread, for example,
in mouthfuls of greenish verbiage, & the warp
Pools overbrim
Only once,
Cruelly once.
the shape our togetherness took
not exactly our decision
not exactly not
The real version is much better but also sadder.
What is he thinking?
Chalk it up to
breathing, chalk it up to
the sweat of past mistakes
an adder’s udder of recollection Nothing New
running from or to and from where?
using a pebble as a stilt, the moon in the high cupboard
has gotten in my skin like fish oil.
I love you right but can never be certain being what I am.
But in my defense, there’s no such thing as
a thief among family.
this morning I’m still alive
Glad, admittedly, if with one rapturous swoop of a MasterCard
My appetite is ruined, my damned demand massacred,
How long was I hung in that moment of um, the whole world strung
over my head?
Now I am the heavy mist over green fjords slicking
atoms of sand sliding for a pleasurable second
What does it take to let reality persist, to stay in the present?
Wrote a letter with a craving for power.
My hair has shifted in shape
Ineluctable like my habits
And I, queenlike, reign over myself
And any who will yield themselves to me
Dreamer, you know you are a dreamer
along spiraling jetties of silence
Twinky residue and
Parchment dry
Heave
stubble flagging gently
beneath pruned nostril
tomorrow i’ll spit
chaw on the terrace
I’m watching the formation of a new world
Through low-quality blast goggles
and said to keep the noise
down. The fluorescent light
above us hummed.
you must know this now
there is no one to know this for you
Both our criticisms are equally hurtful,
But theirs are temporary,
And mine are eternal.
These are slobvious prophecies.
All too soon, too soon,
they’ll sail.
from the roadworks, like blossom
of a horse chestnut, like hands
But why should it be entirely bad?
crown the beads of sweat the dirt unguarded
as his mother makes her motions with her amulets
The whole thing
smelled like an exhalation
of the deepest world.
A bird molting in dislocated shudders.
a ubiquitous condition only
pointed to by that occasional
shape in
the blur,
below the tub’s meniscus
now outside, now inside.
One can’t trim the sails
of an inflatable boat.
broken open and the birds slowly
expanding. I'm here: trash, fountain,
the back of his concrete
skull on the turquoise liquid
“I don’t mean to be critical, but
is something rotting in here?”
It was.
tendons were arrow shields
babies teethed on foot bones
blood was both paint
& pudding & skulls were altars
I don’t know exactly what happened to me.
Who put me here with a mud full of mouth
Did you bring
a sword
this time
No, I broke the stove for fun, waited for my fingers
to smolder and water steel on my tongue.
What’s the secret word.
What’s the secret word.
lost it in
the spin
in the spine
the body
the throat relaxes. water flows to the lungs.
of one burning branch in some wild brush
flapping its carmine leaves.
Hours on the balcony
are progress, compass
pointed to no fixed place,
always correct.
I see the top of the hill just in reach but I can’t make it.
Thighs parted within 50 miles. Hair swept up within 25 miles.
In a Kafkan poetics, the father lacks a temporal sense of the world.
a counter-privation
dateline cruise of Arctic
His happiness is my relief, his sadness
my undoing.
Celtic honeymoons are of stone. No one gets in or out.
our crystalline symmetry / embodied
What fears may take our shape.
strictly gendered coloration
courts
strictly gendered coloration
what is that you want to inhabit this gravity.
a big Fuck You to prudence
I and the country leave February limping
Here on this continent / you consider the proverbial
because he wanted to make films, whereas
films for me were one part of all of creative life
I was trying to imbibe
hold a dull color and therefore a light
slowed your existence
Some injuries are serious
and some not serious enough
the essential purple, less primary
than the same old sky we walked beneath,
information not difficult to explain but logistically necessary and thus made vague
on my way home I list the carcasses I find:
cutlasses strike the charred cane in concert
the splayed roots of an oak, the toothed ridges
of its leaves. The I is hardly there.
When the language doesn’t work
you sew the vowels in your throat.
The rain has ceased, but we linger because anyone, half out the door, often requires a little gift for a person of tertiary importance.
“a planet consisting entirely of white and dark daisies”
I have a watch that reminds me to breathe.
My roof keeps cozy feelings in
while winter haz hir final fling.
I had a dream she was crying and wanted to be let in.
I am ward of Plainness I take
Cunning ever is the selves
We take for helping.
No familiar symbol had come to us
Out of the past to protect our interests
My all-time favorite perk
Was the toy cubicle.
Sometimes you feed me
nonsense at random
about who stole the cat.
We don’t even have a cat.
Every size indicted under the sky, its size
As gauze as a helmeting pulse
Señorita Rigid
Disoriented Rag
regard to inside:
One of the best skills to have is cooking, then repairing your own house then your own car.
& though now all I can much ogle is
snow, that skull was once a kind of proxy
soul, so that when my pals & I all alike
The famous porcupines are rolling up the dean has other plans.
I have always wanted to know what could at least I
didn’t know what yes yet I know that I have killed the dog
The falling back like breath that knows it will swell again
If a night jar
If a flint spoke
If some threads converge
such great distances
or flywheels thrumming
unto oblivion or
By evening you’ll flicker between soppy, obsequious and scrappy
an unsound candle unsure of itself and its voice’s light span
you first arrived red crackling in fireplace
at the end of his life, my father’s dementia
made loops of if there is any score I can settle, say it now.
pressing its greenness / against a slow curve / of light
indigo deep / is the glassy pool
the lake and her mood swings, the water
snake’s tendency of effortless division.
Through to the sweet of otherness,
Dolphin strong enough to negotiate
that bitch fervor/ Inequality in all its fury
Tea of
Big red robes and
Steeded brow.
O, southern constellation of sonic fibers,
publishing white the post-lighting
spray of lines, coil-state snowdrift,
body part
Romans believed
could secrete
the divine
doubtless doubling back in it
to stand up again—
even those that leave it, a weapon of ax
to put the forest at permission, i touch
whole screen is gray our parts are alike in this response they say
Dear paragon program disappointing to no end.
Persimmon orange chairs bleached by the St. Louis sun and hard on the bones in my back.
Was that spotted horse particularly westward?
I applaud for
trees. They do a
great job.
sing with the ladybugs here, by the creek
What's the use now that the shadows
are too wide.
The wind blows. The rain enters. Things get lost.
Underneath all, an unseen, illusory ring of fire encircles
light-fearing Morlocks and Pacific Rim alike
he’d take aim at his hanging trousers and shirts, letting
Points accumulate with each word
Amoebas sometimes project false
feet, sometimes clone themselves.
Descending to haunted churches
To stalk meaning from the emptiness.
Lid must wait
for a jar
(Cannot be digested)
these we eat.
don't tell me you're under contract
what have they hired, your spirit or your hands?
it was back to work
to be scalded in the hot ether of foundry hell
the conductor's morning greeting
With no face value doubts I got in and left
Not knowing if It may be better than what no one should call home
the guard asks “Spending
time with the wrong people?”
itself / the room
inside your room
it plugged the drain hole. Orange as a cheese puff;
It’s a toss
Up to me
And to
Them
and bones and fledglings. The parent and prey
That's when I said I felt like Pope Innocent X
on his throne, baring his fangs, barking
Do not speak;
You burden the trees.
I know we went to Vancouver
but only because I have the photographs
a smoking, a good-looking funeral home
is nest too comfortable for reader’s
in sites of devotion
the domains of obsolescence
in lessons of calm
the prosperity sickness, the world forest
of print – what shoves
between the words
to believe the sirens
and the rocks
the viejos say the currents have never had a diet
My dad helped nail plywood on all the windows afterward
I bet those panels wished they were still trees
if both president & vice died
who becomes president? the espeaker
of the casa
The Bistrica River has by now reached
America, reached the Bronx.
Perhaps in another life
I could’ve known you better than yourself
but what’s Taíno look like these days?
you remember/ me as bold & wild with a cavity of laughter
the part of the collective
unconsciousness you can access
at times a scream at times breathlessness
The right selfie outlasts
the self.
Yes, we'd been sent here to die, but the flesh
of fish had never been sweeter
It’s a violent thing to be alive
in the back seat / of your blue
beetle submerged
Could be luck’s the
River Jordan of fiction
The room is brighter / than me, conspicuously so
Improbable fingers bear skyward
if i allow for all means of ruin
that night my navel became an easel,
became its own front yard
vocoders and color guards
and fiberglass tubas
Isn’t she so much more beautiful when she’s crying
The Mischiefs
Head Scratchers
Tall Dudes
Blood Tide
A membrane continues / with various openings.
until memory’s opposite
I thought about an unlamented red
out-love time, press
one ear against the door of a stranded
elevator.
Two proofs that brutes cannot abstract
A source of bullets
O mutable
program, borders atremble
Us a couple of untucked cowbots
The marsh. The basic puttering. The eyewitnesses
percolated in the minds to reveal the existence
The midge, the bleed around the edge.
Under the archway
they can see she’s gone
so my bones are liquid in sleep
(the way bones
often do)
entrapment or caution?
everyone is naked do i know
what my body is planning
Nobody can agree what
to do with the creature because
nobody can agree what to call it.