Two boys
and girls
unclothed each other
simply at a picnic
flush with wine
alongside
sun-flecked trees.

The girls,
easy as the
forest round,
burned,
delicious,
as the boys
eager and nervous
in unequal measure
partly gave up
concealing
their joys
at forgetting
or remembering
in flickers
their bare bodies.

It went on
over nettles
and half-hours
and clambered
trees and
photos taken
almost formally
(on film,
of course).

And boyish lust,
at first sinuous,
a darting tongue,
began to
soften against,
for instance,
the sheer,
unthinkable
texture
of the two
girls carved
now backward
over the bough
of a storm-felled elm.

And there
in the embers
of evening
they learned
to thrill originally
at the vast,
gorgeous
and astonishing
irrelevance
of what
might happen next.

There are nights when I dream.

It’s my father,
and I’m an adult.
And he’s in my kitchen.
So I know I’m dreaming.

And with his fists knotted in his jacket,
he offers a smirk.
“I know what you’ve been up to.”

And he does.

You’ve been saying “heh” a lot.
You’ve been thinking you’re clever.
You’ve been hoping silence equals shrewdness.
(You’re quite taken by the theater of your own anger.)
You keep getting taken by the mechanic.
You’ve been giving the desperate glances of a subway ******.
You’ve been pretending to be a man.
You’ve been hoping someone else will put out the fire.

Now we’re holding a couple of beers by a truck, overlooking a lake.
Inexplicably, we’re going hunting.
“It’s ok.  This is how it is.”
He deliberately checks the sight.

And with the certainty of a father, he tells me he knows.

But I remember it’s a dream,
because he doesn’t.

I shave my legs and pits and bits
in an effort to fit right in
But I'm always late
I'm "the chubby mate"
who would give anything just to be thin

My friends are pretty where I am plain
although none of them would ever say
So I'm left with no choice,
to get close to the boys
I have to give it away

Don't me wrong I like it
For those few minutes I feel real pretty
But ten minutes on
when he's already gone
Thats when I start to feel ******

I know I'm not the prettiest girl
but I'm honest, loyal and true.
If a boy could see past
the size of my ***
Well there ain't much that we couldn't do

Once upon a time
I killed a man
I did because I'm addicted
and I needed to **** some time.
I put his body in the fabric of the couch
my friends and I sat on him
we discussed friendship and coffee
and when they mentioned the smell,
I just smiled and said it was the table.

blunt tips of bent cigarettes
were incisive as razors -
sliced wrists weeping
bright red sentences,
spattered unborn to blank paper
and turned into statues
so the dead would always remember
what they did,
never safe in the graves
in which they'd took refuge

but blue on blue
was ever her color;
blue on blues
seeping from old sins,
deep, hidden within spidery veins
that traced pale, soft *******,
finally filling mute lips as she slept,
subsumed in oceans of color,
blues that gave stories, as waves to shore
subsided, reclaiming their pain,
and cleansed sand once more

What end to life!
a collection of furies like stone turtles
arranged on the mantle -
just a few dozen last words
tucked among ads for
Old Spice and Polident tabs
unread, used to line
litter boxes in Cambridge
or wrap fresh fish at Hay Market;

then, someone pausing to wave at the sky
missed saving the drowning woman
by years, if he'd tried,
finding questions in every answer;
child curled in hard lap of his mother,
her cold affections of words
blew from dead lips like old wishes
without tender touch or wet kisses;
but that life continued,
if lived only blue on blue

How soft we've become, sitting on cushions instead of curbs.