Mike and Nick and Tom are already playing stickball in the back lot when Dad drops you off at P.S. 236. On one brick wall they’ve chalked a strike zone, on the floor is a powder-blue pitcher’s mound

you have probably peed with everyone you’ve ever loved, including the woman you do right now

Previously on...
Part 4  ||  Part 3  ||  Part 2  ||  Part 1 

Last year, Tim and I bought cardboard cutouts of ourselves ($129 each, apparently for charity) that watched every Athletics game in the stadium that we could not.

My husband Paul and I are drinking beers and eating hot dogs at the baseball stadium in San Francisco. It’s even a little boring, and I have my back to the field for a while so can I face my friends

In 1949 we had viewed television for three years on a 12” screen. It inhabited a large wooden box with doors that pulled out and covered the picture tube when not in use. For the most part in those

Bishop and I were smoking a joint on the pitcher’s mound. We drew dicks with our fingers next our school’s logo. It was mid-March, around midnight. I stopped drawing dicks and looked up at the empty

She was cursing at her TV. A Red Sox game was on. She was yelling at David Price, newly acquired from the Detroit Tigers. Price was behind in the count. I wanted to tell her that David Price was a

When he drops you off at home you realize the soles of your feet are covered in tar.

From the couch corner where 
his ass has crafted a killer dent
for the better part of a week,
my father begins shouting insane cuss words
at no one in particular – 
titty fucker bang bang, cunty

TOOLS OF IGNORANCE

“[the term] tools of ignorance...was meant to be ironic, contrasting the intelligence needed by a catcher to handle the duties of the position with the foolishness needed to play

Let them do the majority of the talking. Laugh at their jokes. Ask them about their motorcycle, their new car, their recent trip to the Maldives.

The Festival of Convictions

5781     not moved to ceremony but moved
by the ground rejecting this nonsense   windows etc.
this very hill’s lack of integrity and possibly imminent dying

An absorbed sound

There was the night where the snow was quieter than usual
& your car wouldn’t start, so we stood under concrete

steeples to wait for the tow truck until your last hand

She gives me a pocketknife. It has an ergonomic handle with smartly placed finger notches, a nice stainless-steel blade that folds up, a sturdy, low-riding pocket clip—perfect for those inconvenient moments you need to cut something loose.

Times the Dog Looks for God

Sun is too hot
Sun is too cold
Fire alarm

Balsamic Moon

Lightning in remembered spaces
going dormant
Shade avoidance and dashboard doubles

Feeling

By late August, Mary-Beth was sweating on her front porch swing, a bottle of Budweiser resting on the table her daughter Madison gave her for Mother’s Day a decade earlier. Mary-Beth had been watching

la tienda, or, the earth, fertile with nettles and

vegetables, bringing forth these meager

cypresses, this black damp that stains the

walls 

1.

words fall off the curl of nothing

I

I have made my decision: I am going to set myself on fire.

don’t answer that

another quar poem

in the sixth month
i want to play skee ball
and put it in my mouth after.
i don’t know if my mouth
is big enough. it’s been so long.
which is bigger, the

All blue awnings

man stands for myriad of anonymous nouns
something like far off voice
presumably an empty mountain becoming his own
invention, able to stand by itself (i.e. come where I am)
is

It only took Kyle a few days to make his confession about the other woman. It took nine months for him to tell me he couldn’t ride a bike.

We preened our signatures in the cheerful attic, Owen’s royal insignia and my fallen few ants.

hints on health

you touched my skin
in the crowded afternoon
my blood like a bloom
warm and erected

our bodies are useless
in winter
my need for excess
diminishes to the pursuit
of damp

They said that Xianrenzhang took your heart because she didn’t have her own. She was looking for one that was just the right size, not too big and not too small, that she could slot into the cavern in her chest.

sadness dies badly like a waiting room plant

every body is mostly water
and will still only sink or float

it’s so maddening
it takes me two hours to finish
an apple

sometimes the human in