Rain drags its cage / through the neighborhood. You / see nothing but // trenches. Rusty shovels, / the alien rocks sprayed / like genitals. 

For weeks after, I watched California burn / out my window & on the evening news & the ash // in my cheeks became the only way/ to pronounce home.

My dog keeps biting me when he’s scared / and, like anyone, is always scared.

With the bobby pin I’ve kept beneath my tongue all morning, / my fingers spring the lock to my parent’s bedroom // where mom’s cherry lipstick glows beneath a seashell lamp. 

New Jersey as land of claws & fangs & deep fields of grass that stumble onto the side of the highway // New Jersey as fields of soft dirty ice // New Jersey as blondhairblueeyes slapping you in the face at lunch in the cafeteria in front of all your friends

I’ve mooned away my marriage, / grounded it, ripped the fuselage / in two, or is the better metaphor
to say I heard the countdown go / from ten to zero and didn’t even / try to stop my wife from breaking / the gravity of disaster planet me?

Field Notes in Haiku

I hear a giant
lives in a stardew valley
I follow the signs:

a knot of sparrows
outlines the shape of a nose—
cold autumn rainfall

the field of yarrow
turned

you know me like an artifact

1

[meimei’s a meatness sis slug of blood boat the body tiger the teeth selfie tongue selfie chintilt selfie lilt her lily pucker her puss pin her skin back tap her mouth flap saps herself a shelf

chew on that witya brainteeth!

mother moon stop calling me

Dogwood 

I knew the blossoms. I caught 
them all. My mother
won’t let me forget this.  
But really, what’s so bad about 
marking this way?  
The tree saying she was this high
the summer she

 between what is love and what is fixation of 

I live my life by white lies.
And poetry is white lies.
Second language is white lies too.
As well as the first.
But language is the only way 
to hide love.
White, black, transparent,
or

I engrave myself into the floor

what a creature I would make of myself if I were able
to be known to be close to anything to be grounded

as always, my resolution

is to get a Guns N’ Roses tattoo

//
i wish i
                    can fly
                    was in dixie
                    could quit
                    was on vacation
                    was taller
                   

I told you to stay right there and not move

LONG DISTANCE CUNNILINGUS 

hi near stranger 
I want to impale 
myself on you

you little wolf-cry
your nostrils flare your eyes flare
you ask me 
am I pretty
with your pretty mouth

your

I know god is real because persimmons exist.

He paints using the ashes of the towers in his watercolors.

i mean, i was black before too.

The air before me
is the flavor of
an oat cake popsicle.
Or a shoe box. 
Or the water sports
I’m not doing. 
So I sign for
a prescription
while all the world
is water sporting
in

Fifty cents for tickets in the bleachers—then. Fifty cents a railroad car to Pittsburgh.
A “marvel” they’d called it. Three tiers of steel, the façade terracotta, the balls off
the deck, bouncing.