"The Hen Who Pecked Her Children to Death" and "I Take My Partner to a Wedding"

Dear              ,
I’m sorry that on your birthday you lost all your money gambling while I made $250.

We have not seen Mark for the rest of the season, confirming my steadfast belief that he was either a criminal masquerading as an employee or an employee who was immediately fired once his conduct towards an Access Member and celebrated Hobart columnist was discovered.

THE SEATTLE MARINERS' history is one long tale of woe studded with infrequently dazzling displays of capability, with all of it adding up to exactly zero championships. I say this as someone who has

That chorus, the coda of “Famous Last Words,” which closes the album except for the gimmick bonus “Blood,” pretty much saved me.

Only 498 words remain. So, let's turn to death.

From the time I was seven until I started taking Seroquel, an anti-psychotic, I had this unending feeling of doom.  ‘My go to’, be that of death.

I kept my thoughts about Bitchface Becky to myself

 but then Beyoncé did something magical

Our waitress bustles around smiling a strangely huge smile for this boring work night. My boyfriend Nick and I don’t follow football and weren’t invited to any parties, and since most Texans are either holding or attending parties the place is pretty deserted. After the waitress brings our waters she follows her normal script and asks if we want to try a signature TGI Fridays drink, but her eyes keep dancing to the bar behind us.

Perhaps we are simply trying to figure out how to stay inside a relationship – our relationship – and figure out how to physically exit the space we currently inhabit and enter another. 

Orange

It’s a child’s color                        or it should be             tasting like early summer 
before it fades to the broom-sweep coat of the dog days.
But now our nightmares are

My wife and kids and I are driving around in New Orleans, not too far from where I spent the first years of my life and then the occasional week during the summer when I stayed with my grandmother

When I was younger, if you had a hard time following rules, you became an artist.

Now, if you have a hard time following rules, you become an entrepreneur.

People in the literary world follow rules the most.

I was seventeen, so he was a man — had I been older, maybe not.

Show her face to the camera. Put your finger in her mouth.

Bible | Vers

Top to Bottom | scan my profile | For Christ’s Sake | Sing Jesus’ Name | I gospel & apostle | Book of Vers | My rural bottom’s up | My crop /top | down along the road | a hym(n) in

I felt as cold and empty as that body lying in that casket lined with fabric smooth and silky white, so different from what usually cradled my grandma’s skin, those soft, oft-washed dresses always topped with a floral apron.

There’s a song in my figurative head 
that I can’t shake loose. 
When I was a body, 
I did so many things with my hands, 
I can’t count. 
Around here it smells like lightning, 
like plasma.

Here is your neighbor, blood forking from her nose, catching on her lip. 

05:05 am. My eyes open. A faint pearly blade of light squeezing past the blind. The distant metallic scrape of a moving tram.   

i’ve never attended a wedding and i wasn’t going to start now. my muscles were aching and my jaw was carrying a million bees, terrorizing the sides of my ears and throat. 

Portrait of Boy Refusing His Father's Music

The kids talk about Posh Spice. 
They sing Top 40 hits.                Mother drops me off.  

High volume on, the ballads sung by her 
are

By the time the keys were in my eager teenaged hand, this car had been through some shit. Even ignoring the holes burned into the driver’s-side door, the missing half of the left side mirror, and the warped, discolored metal down the rest of the vehicle, the car was 13 years old already, and it looked it.

The cherry and strawberry seasons have passed; the apples are reddening. Only a few games remain. A Pit Spitter lays down a bunt, and the runner on third crashes in: a perfect suicide squeeze.

All that whimpers isn’t want.

One spring, I pulled
a reed from an oboe.
I planted it by a pond. 
Instantly, it grew 

dense at the water’s edge. 
The wind told lie after lie—

black

There is snow that falls like a snake. It comes from the sky hissing and finds a bush to hide beneath. The leaves on the branches of the River Birch are alive, again, vibrating. They are brown and