work

I’m from saddles and sweet feed,
tractors, and rusted-out pickups.
I’m from driving before sixteen;
calves tied to domes;
galloping through cornfields
past houses of history…

How shall I explain?
That I do not create these verses
They create me –
Leaking from my being
Like shedded skin
Tender and fragile and breakable…

A twins’ bedroom in 2000. The girls are six, as even as the year and the room. Their mother Cynthia Rose, having duplicated herself, named them Cyn and Rosie: Rosie for a rosier future and Cyn as a middle finger to a preachy grandfather. Cyn’s and Rosie’s twin beds have unwashed sheets and flat pillows and shelves above with two

He claims he’s a dragon
but his scales are painted cardboard—
only for show

He claims he’s a nightmare
but I’ve seen him pick roadside wildflowers…

Dust
Dust
Dust
Dust
From dust to dust, and…

a story where fruit refuses. up away / temptation tie / leaves blank. / a / stupid fish gimme a church smile / stomach lined / two bucks to delete a wish…

How many women have cried over blood?
Pouring out of us:
Feminine power come and gone.
Stained tears drenching:
a life desired that hasn’t yet come…

My hometown & I are entangled in / a fake dating scheme, where I pretend / I want to go back & it pretends to want me there…

As classic Chinese suggests, we can
Reasonably attain linguistic equality
In English as long as we all agree
To use I, still for the first person singular…

In another life, let’s start
an all-girl band called Raspberry Hairs.
Maddy on the drums, Nina on the bass,
Brooke with her guitar, Andrea with their cello.
Naira can sing; maybe Liv can learn piano…

my father holds my hand while i eat at the seder / i say next year in egypt i’ll be better
manna was nothing but a gift / my grandfathers didn’t get so stupid about being skinny…

She tells me the story of the cursed child. It’s about how the cursed child becomes the curse and she can’t do anything about it. He asks me if I remember what it felt like to love him. I am a casualty of the war I started. I tell her I’ve always been afraid. She asks me what I’m afraid

A plantation girl brought me a cup of water / And I told her without restraint about my excitement / My daughter, like a fish, says meow and is looking for a husband…

Tonight, as the sky pee on earth
my roof makes music with it.

Inside, the color of charcoal
engulfs me and the one

I call mine, as we lay
like two farm ridges..

The pretend parishioners, slowly swallowed by their prey, walk past white steeples. Boa constrictors disguised as old women’s fashion statements steal their last breath. Crocodile cowboy boots, suddenly alive, feast on the remains. The absurdity of it all, not lost on the naked undertaker signing the cross with his missing fingers. Is this how the believers disappear from earth? Naked

Mommy said I had to wear
the red turtleneck, Aunt Laura’s gift,
tarantula legs wrapping round my throat.
It was Davy’s second birthday,
and I was four. This is the game
I have to play. Fuzzy scarlet fingers
pressing into my pulse point…

The cabinet doors slide open: a stage — / red and blue ceramic mushrooms (they / don’t dance) / poodle-head perfume bottle (might dance) / glass deer chained to her babies (she can’t / stop to dance)…

how loud should i holler
when you knock me back down
if i concur i belong
here on the cellar floor…

A spherical object—mid-air, is reason enough to come for your head: / another way to harm your gayest memories. / an opponent launches an attack…

Everything in life has culminated to this moment. Sitting in a leather chair with long worn padding, grasping long thin fingers against the denim of your pocket, counting change, making sure; Hairdressers and farriers both only have three questions: how do you do? What do you do? And who do you do? All of which surprisingly could be logically answered

As someone
who’s had both
COVID fatigue and
Long COVID fatigue…

I was admiring the aristocratic Grande Dame portrait on a Tuesday afternoon; a day when the Abruzzo Museum of Art History is hauntingly inactive and I’m free from the perturbed looks I get from the usual late-week crowd. I’m reluctant to admit, but somewhere along my embryonic development my Pavlovian wires got crossed and because of these ritual Tuesdays, I

The graphic squawk of tattoos
ringing a bicep,
blue ink scrambling over ancient scars
Time for more pirate’s breath prose,
a hot sauce thick with
chunks of the unsayable and unacceptable…

My engagement ring dozes
in a square blue satin box
worn a year then removed….

television set
of the body dark but still
warm to the touch, was
switched off between commercials
boxed he collects like dust…

Sinner get ready / God will save my upper back & the / brick upon my knee / to soon ricochet, no hope no fear. / Sinner get ready— / there’s sanctum in a fragile void…

my body is a hungry maw, bearskin
wired along the mound streaming to coarse
red and thick as my blood. overeager
swim upstream, dark—nearly black—on stark
pale, it is a beast within the flesh machine…

You’re halfway over Quincentennial Bridge when the music stops. Your perfect fantasy comes to a gunshot halt, and you look at your phone as the battery dies and the screen fades to black. The world you were living in crashes down around you in an unholy, cataclysmic, millisecond apocalypse, and now it’s just you and the things you’re left alone

In the photo they put on her grave
she wears a shell pendant, and you
feel the ocean behind her, the wind.
I remember her in many occasions,
but especially twice…