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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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. 

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

Morning gets angry and destroys a city
not New York, too obvious, but suppose
it’s on the coast. Suppose we’re the first to go

I picture Goya’s Colossus and my empathy
runs threadbare. Suppose

He’s soaked in sweat already and all he’s done is drive. He must know what they are here to find.

“Well, just be careful you don’t get caught with your pants down at the wrong kinda toilet.”

                             in response to a student evaluation for a science fiction class, Fall 2018

Student, it’s true—I prefer women
to lentils, to crossfit classes,
to retirement plan

Sometimes I want to take the industrial strength green Korean loofah, my sandpapery mitten, and just scrub at my face until huge chunks of flesh tear away and roll into brown fleshy noodles and fall to the floor. Afterwards, I won’t be bloody and flayed, all raw nerve endings and hamburger meat, I’ll be smooth as a peeled egg, soft and firm and pliant to the touch.

My heart is open. I can feel it. It’s never open. This can’t be a coincidence. This—

this poem starts on a tuesday in Kansas

a twister settles in. there is a twister dancing 
in the night like a blight on the sky’s eye & 
the people are afraid. someone yells: there is a

My father’s disjointed rage has shocked him—I’ve seen that look before. He no longer draws from his beer even as Dad tilts his own way up.