The Germans call it the downfall. The French call it sleep. The Polish just give you vague directions.

Jokes for People Who Had Good Fathers

Something about rock and roll music
and leaf blowing,              yard work

Dads who speak in puns and are called
Dad, probably but not

It’s also the story of a horse, which is a word but also a kind of animal.

I wear glasses now, Luis,
you wouldn’t even recognize me.

It was tiny, the prefab. A neat little one-room bungalow with a kitchenette along one wall and a tiny separate bathroom and the saleswoman told Greg that, in a pinch, he could move in as soon as it was delivered.

All I wanted to do was tell some jokes at an open mic and look what I had to go through. I was running for my life.

Forkful of Artichoke

He thinks I can will myself to love him,
when I know love as a species of hunger.
I know the heart, like the stomach
cannot will itself to appetite.
Rum-drunk,

 I looked down and saw, in place of the disorder there had been, the penis and testicles of a small boy sprouting from me, growing incrementally as I ran, at about the rate of one year per second. 

Did it bother him that his only erotic recourse that evening would be to pretend masterpiece on her face? Yes. 

The Noah Cicero who answered Juliet Escoria’s questions, he is already gone and to take it farther he wasn’t even there before he answered the questions. The Noah Cicero that answered the questions was only that Noah Cicero.

Katie keeps a pet duck in her Echo Park garden house. We sit on the edge of her tub and she sings, 'You are so beautiful to me,' the Joe Cocker song.

We sat many a Saturday
on the bank of The Han River,
in Seoul. Drinking makkoli,
looking at Basquiats, talking
about what it means to be Jewish,
when we danced at Susie Q's to
"Changes"

The tone deaf values most families scrambled to anesthetize irked my metabolism. 

and yes, I know how everyone beats up on StevenHawking, that he doesn’t do his thinking for himself, he had one good idea and that was that

Coincidentally, I read the third book of My Struggle in the two weeks leading up to my daughter’s third birthday. The coincidence is that my daughter was experimenting with a particularly annoying

With my back to the washer and dryer I started pissing down the wall.

Space Suit

I fell asleep in my space suit again. I know this is out of hand, but the moon is getting a bad name, and there are men out there who need me to be an example of how to treat the

We stood there, not knowing what to do, so he lowered himself to the floor to show me how he slept.

“Don't you get cold?”

“Only when it's windy.”

“You're in Wyoming.” 

“I'll show

I’m troubled to notice odd similarities between my nihilism and the right wing. 

Babies from the Dry Counties became a fated élite. From the creamiest of breasts to organic kale pudding and Montessori kindergarten.

We were trying to figure out what a deer's home is called. A thicket? A glen?

I.

When I was a kid I believed
in good old-fashioned animistic
souls coming out of the grass
and the sky and the rocks. 

I loved walking
in Las Rocas de Santo Domingo
and seeing

The trouble with paddling is your arms get tired. I tell this to the girls but they don’t listen.

With my inheritance I buy duck prosciutto and rent vacation homes on beaches and mountains.

Why are your TEETH YELLOW?

Between The Social Network and The Imitation Game, we can decipher precisely how our genitals should disrobe us. I, for one, will be relieved to wave them uploaded straight under Darwin’s

I learned about food chains today...

I Have

I have a
wet mouth
in this pink
apartment.

I still have that.

Boy—
you think we’re in love?

Don’t you
roughhouse
with me.

You’re trying.
But at this

15 October

The daytime moon is halved in a bright blue sky and a confusion of birds flows together and apart again over the English/Philosophy building, evading a hawk—this is the feast day of

I was talking about my obsession with the writing of Milan Kundera...