This final image crushed me. It was a forewarning of what identity destruction can lead to if we
don’t truly understand ourselves to begin with.

I hold myself in the plank position. The little dog sits on the rug watching. It’s a very expensive rug. She’s not supposed to be here. He’s up on the purple couch and I do not know what he is

I first saw Todd Field’s Tár in a packed theatre in Bloomfield Township, Michigan with a crowd
of mostly middle-aged and above upper to upper-middle class New Yorker-tote-bag liberal types.
During the first 20 or so minutes of the film I found myself annoyed, fidgeting in my seat and
groaning as I sat through the titular EGOT winner’s conversation with Adam Gopnick.

i ask if i could be june
my birth month he says all days any days
for a smile like mine

You might be reluctant to try liver mush. You might think it’s not for me. But you are at a party, and you’ve been cornered by a stranger, and there’s nobody else there you really want to talk to, and

There is one boat out every day.
We are never packed in time to take it.

Under the ribs, between the lungs, where no periscope lives
to view the damage of long nights spent in cold underpasses...

For the first time ever, they were being honest about their sex lives.

He wondered, "What if I never get out of the shower?" and just like that he never did.

I smile now, waiting, always waiting, for you to reappear and remember me ...

One night of nothing

When the languorous motion of bats and owls overthrows the scorching August air
making a party only takes three

One night of nothing
heavy      on an empty

Margot and I had humped once, too, when I stopped by and Andrea wasn’t home.

1.

And they all lived happily ever after. 

2.

Finishing work on the Saturday and heading to the pub because that’s what we always did. Tall Paul and small Paul and (ordinary) Paul, Ian, Bel,

I confess my DIY rituals in high school, tiny fires fueled by crumpled notes and dried flowers from lost loves and later, gifts from my parents bought during the divorce. In the smoke, my hope conceived visions: sometimes revenge, always return. Nothing I witnessed was more than smoke

Everything that could have possibly budged already had, anything neglectable was long ago done so.

Color Study, or Ode to Discomfort

It was never safe for us—
always beneath the eye is blood;
and maybe a ferocious tongue
called

They walked along the railroad somewhere in Atlanta on a cold and bitter night, the full moon above them like a yellow coin some unforgiving God had tossed far out into the galaxy. In the near