The holidays loom and I’ve got two weeks off work. Last Christmas was pretty quiet. Not much family left. Karen was the one with the big family. I enjoy the church service in the morning. The kids

I once let the person I loved prick my ribcage with a needle a thousand times so I wouldn’t forget. A collection of dots arcing messily into two black brackets.

I WRITE PANIC

into the locked kitchen
cabinet, china chipped
& sticky. i write
myself into a bottle
of vodka, sloshing
in waves of bitter
padded tongue.
i write the morning
green &

crying boyfriend

feels like me and god are fighting
they don’t want me to do anything

getting my period at midnight
my poems are like prayers

god doesn’t want me to stop learning
maybe i

Describing Feminine Energy

I am electric-orange.
I am strong legs running
through a poppy field, two arms
thrown open, both feet meeting
soil, moon-face turned up to
the sun, with lips like

Wait Here

Though sometimes the present clutches,
panoramic scattered, in gigantic ways,
we wonder about “its persistent fluttering.” 
Later, far-reaching, bark phone in the wind dawn
that

immediately I thought, “Oh shit! They got Kanye!” 

Lee and Aiko made a deal; one last trip together. They could make it feel like the end of something, if that’s what it was going to be.

                       words to describe love

saw a pretty plant through a store window
                                                                    picked out a different one instead
that

It was clear she had been here from the smell of wind in the room.

THE FORGE

we’re speaking by the heat of the
forge, perspiring, charlie grasping
the end of my steel rod with gloved
hands, i pounding metal atop the
metal shop anvil with a sledge ham
-mer.

I am writing you now from a city we scored with nomadic walking fourteen months ago. During that trip I had been ill. 

There were no ornaments for the tree but there was beer.

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

In this dappled language, like a woods painted by Neil Welliver, in and out of our attention, animals wander in the camouflage. They are highlighted by our attention: each stands in a yellow bar of

Dan disowned my sister and me via email a year ago

for M

   i.
In the beginning there was only the girl
and the ocean. Someone was telling a story; 

in the story a girl’s friend died, an accident, 
so she walked into the sea, breathed

I grew up in the predominantly all-white neighborhood of Warwick, Rhode Island; I was one of only two Black kids in my elementary, junior high, and high schools. I dressed well, presented myself well, got good grades.

My friends and I would see you on the streets and say you looked like a villain. Slicked back black hair, tall and thin, distrusting gaze, but handsome. All sinister swagger.

Your hair blows like a plastic grocery bag...

The seafood restaurant in my dreams closed down last night.

Many days I realize my dreams are fiction half way through.

"Lyric" and "Obvious Pairs"

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

its stagnant swollen limbs...

1985: the year of “high-risk” and Careless Whispers. His appearance was brief —lasting all of ten second— but there he was, following an interview between Debbie Harry and Nick Rhodes on the Palladium.