things will get harder before they get easier

Monica invites you to her church while you’re jumping rope. You’ve never been, and she tells you they mostly eat donuts and play, and talk about the bible sometimes, but just a little. Since donuts

Lies are told beneath silvery moons
And far beyond sad boys and girls falling in love.

on a quest for boobs / i become evil

At first, Grandpa thought a hawk had dropped a rabbit on Dad's head.

You are so smooth-skinned / I would send your husband / to war to die.

i grew tired of bukowski's penis / even deer looked plastic 

8: Perhaps we’ve misheard. Perhaps our facility with language will lead to our downfall. Perhaps the public lauding of our own personas is parasitic and causes continuous displacement.

And never, ever write a poem

tomorrow is what garfield / hates most of all

You hug me from behind.
Surprise attacks make me nervous.

mew mew

The final weekend of January I boarded a plane to Seattle to see, for the first time, a man I had met on a kink website. Or, as I had considered multiple times over the last two months during which we

The homing pigeon / of misery / is my baby mama's / text message.

I could hear the usual blues music booming from Ryan’s garage as I got off my bike in the driveway, sweating through my Smoothie King uniform. Ryan’s dad had started and quit three blues bands in the

Uncle Dale says, “We’re lucky that none of us can fly.”

He was only Jack. Never daddy.

In late July, in the mid-nineties, I begged Mom and her fiancé Paul to buy me a big ball at Roses department store.

I'm sure a terrible something has occurred at every inhabitable coordinate. 

There was a week when my grandma was gone, I had the whole place to myself, was drinking the regular Coca Cola classic and the half sized baby Coca Cola and brought the Abercrombie pictures out in the open on the second floor. I meditated.