Drainage stains. Snow turns to shivering rain. The rear facing concrete walls.

waylon in the kitchen
pancakes
the pain of a tattoo gun on ribs 

“you’re bad at finishing beverages that aren’t alcoholic,” you told me

You must stop dating
physicists, that sere barnacling across
the cold, leeward faces of rocks.

writing fiction in which people google things,
suffering in a very abstract way
trying very hard to shut the fuck up & failing

At the head of the conference table sat a man scrolling on his phone, whom Michael intuited was the leader of this secret society. 

I finger a ring of keys and wonder what doors they might unlock.

It’s a sin,
to desire different architecture, I’m told

in a cellar not far from here, wine waits years to peak
before a bottle is cracked open only to empty
a bruise.

Burying me # alive 
in training pants and # rags is my son’s 
# gift of sorts

Coolness is an anchor, a fortress, a cold and remote puritanism.

The other day she showed up at André’s apartment in the middle of the night with a red rose and, in the bottom of her purse, a steak knife...

Waxing Phase

Sparrow day
draining to red

red wall of night
night a voice

caught within the throat
the throat a tunnel

a blackened river
a wing bending

a moonrise

Night

He sits alone on the beach with his feet in the sand, cigarette in mouth, eyes on the water, though there’s no one out here who knows him, and it’s not clear what he wants, unless what he wants is to be alone, in which case he picked the wrong part of the strand.

I worried I had magically bloated between 9 a.m. and lunch time, even though I’d only eaten the prescribed six saltine crackers.

that was the year that all the carnivals came to town. sounds like a fake small town thing, but when you live in a small town, all the things that happen are fake small town things, except they’re

The summer I was allergic to tap water was the summer I lost all my friends. School was out but nobody wanted to be around me except for Joel who wasn’t really my friend to begin with but sort of became one afterwards. It was understandable. I couldn’t shower and, well, to be perfectly honest, I smelled bad. Joel didn’t seem to mind, though. He worked the check-out at the general store and taped his ear to his head.

And V, who had been high all day and drinking since around 4pm, suddenly realized how fucking bored she was of all of it, of once again drinking her way through grad school in a cool city going to goth nights with people she was or wasn’t in love with and so V thought about getting up mid-sentence and leaving and calling her old sponsor and hitting up a late night AA meeting or maybe even just going home and getting some sleep or crying but instead she just listened to herself charmingly talk about nothing until she couldn’t stand it and asked the girl to dance.

I was a glamour upon a glamour upon a glamour, a mouth devouring a mouth devouring a mouth.

hemos vuelto heridos de una guerra que todavía no empieza
yo perdí una de mis extremidades
y él las perdió todas