analgesic for apostates

nosediving from the ketamine and
distracting myself from the open
wound on my back, crimson-soaked

mesh shorts and criminally cotton
mouth, the nurse flashes flawless

“Maybe your ears are broken,” my husband mused to me one night at dinner.

I was wearing headphones, eyes trained to study my plate, the sight of chewing as triggering as the audible noises. 

Sonnet

     Водопровод – человеческая мысль, связь вещей, победившая хаос, священная организация, централизация. Л. Гинзбург

Everybody finds it easy to wake up in the
morning
I seem to want to

They liked to brag. Who had the highest dose of anti-psychotic medication? Who had gone the furthest off the rails during a manic episode? And they loved to boast about their suicide attempts. Whose was the most gruesome?

a new matchbook

When Tony died, I stopped recycling. The kind of power play that was both meaningful and meaningless.

The old man kicked us out after the fight.

I don’t write “I have the libido of a sloth” in my online dating profile. I don’t use my real surname now either.

"Casual Tease" and "Aria"

The Class of 1953 Tachikawa Air Base Bride School girls were fertile, well-fed and rested.

The only reason I’ve seen Space Jam: A New Legacy so much recently is because I wanted to avoid talking to my wife.

A ferry will capsize with 476 people on board.

Life is viciously short.

"Me, all scatter-shotted words I tried out in the air ..."

i wanna drift like they do...

Spring was months away; I could pretend peril didn’t exist.

“And then after I came out to my wife, she stumbled across People Can Change,” said the man from Fresno.

a new villanelle

Don’t they let you? Don’t they ever let you lay down your head?

n the car, on the way to the hospital, I put my head in my lap and my hands over my ears, willing the city to disappear.

i always loved to keep a summerboy around...

But the shortstop is still bothered.

"Hot Girl Manifesto" and "Blockbuster"

So obviously I couldn’t do it. She would have known it was real.

Years after reading the story (Junot Diaz' "Drown"), after teaching it to high schoolers (many of them POC), I set out to rewrite this queer of color narrative in my story, "The Monks." I wanted to show how a straight, masculine guy of color could brush up against queerness and feel empowered by it, not scared, even if in the slightest of ways, the slightest of spiritual progressions. 

Beautiful, the flat-forever fields of Wisconsin as I barrel on through flurries, gobbling cheese curds, until, through the fluff, the end appears.