Theater of Inheritance

Wrong to say I accept the rough
face of my family. Your father,

so young-looking, your mother
even more. I grew older than boys

around me because I was

On a bench outside the classroom on our fifteen-minute break, I close my eyes and practice the grounding exercise my therapist taught me earlier that week. Facing the rush hour freeway, I try to

(Iowa City 1995)

What I think I want, is Inez . . . Fuck! Now it’s a blur. Drawing. Rather, a dream in which I’m drawing.

Canada Goose — the age-old adage of 
whether or not a ton of bricks or a ton 

of feathers is heavier & the fact that it’s
always the feathers because you have to live 

with the guilt on

I came from the city, was sort of swept away by the bristles of time and love and bowel-upsetting uncertainty, and I am now in a dust pan called Mora County, New Mexico. Dust pan is not derogatory; it’s a just a place where things end up.

On the tip of my tongue, the shadow of your incomplete rebellion 
a riverine blister ; a city-street broken into brick-brats, 

glued together again to fashion a ceramic gnome, its 
rickety

“Hey buddy, are you alright?” 

The husband looked at me with a smile disguising mild alarm. 

“I’m going to be.” 

The guy looks over and sees me eating my pepper steak. He is a hard blur of hair and grease. For one brief minute, I think he’s going to lasso me or ask me to come over and polish off a bag of pork rinds.

We keep what’s between us a secret. 
I’m supposed to be at your house

and you’re supposed to be at mine,
but, really, we lie in the center of the wheat 

where no one can find us, make

Echo pressed her index finger to the Facebook icon on her phone, opening up a chat with her recent ex, Morgan, who was still typing.

the history of countries is the story of roaming. And maps are relatively new inventions in the human narrative 

i came to America too young
to be foreign, so all my dreams 
are American and contemporary,
present and blinding as morning-hunger:
a fat gull scavenges for loose plastic bags 
and their

Pete wasn’t looking at me. He was half listening, half joking and trading cash with girls walking men in and out of private rooms.

“You thought about being a dancer?”

My husband is a proficient fighter. He catalogs the inconsistencies between the things I say and things I do. Against this tactic, I have no defense. For he is right, but what he fails to understand is the internal consistency in my inconsistency.

ON Drugs, Magic, and the Sanctity of Losing Your Shit

Like any self-respecting Gen-Xer, I spent the bulk of my teenage years doing drugs. I tried all kinds: ecstacy, mda, coke, meth… I even tried

But I didn't feel sick anymore, was the thing. The sweating, capsizing sensation, the kaleidoscope of Muppets I saw square dancing behind my eyelids on that third night when it was legitimately bad, all that had been weeks ago and still everyone brought my mother food. 

is the egg yolk, broken when it was meant to be fried, 
the sobbing of a child who’s just found 
that their favorite character does not survive, 

the scraped knee, the store out of cigarettes

                                                 ⁠–⁠After José Olivarez 

When Carly’s body
isn’t a body but ash
they wish to be poured
into Lake Washington
below a sun becoming half
a sun,

Fine Line
Harry Styles
Released: December 13, 2019
Label: Columbia and Erskine
Length: 46 minutes, 12 songs

My review is best summed up by alternative titles for each track because this is

Until this year, I didn’t know I get seasick.

I board a boat on the northern coast of what they now call Sri Lanka, outside my ammah’s hometown, and I sit down below. I accept my friend’s offer of

“Louis has stopped taking his dose.”

Sarah lowered herself to her knees in front of the fridge, continuing to uselessly rearrange the sanguinium. 

“We think maybe you can spend some extra time with him, maybe get him to start taking it again,” Tim said. “You do great with Dotty.”

Normal: a word-world I, as cisgender, could claim. That she couldn’t. So many label traps. Normal, gender, virginity. Sarah.

Hours later, when all these thoughts and feelings had been erased by his pressing occupations, he got a text from her.
“dont b mad”

“There are some things that just cannot be reconciled,” the duck quacked, as it waddled across the path.

The man was disturbed. There seemed to be no end to the rain's falling, but only he was