another tree frog
pushes its luck on my porch
dislodges hairball

To me it feels like a worm
Wiggling its way
Through my bloodstream,
Making it icy and cold
And my heart turn
To frigid emotion.

It makes its way into my
Mind,
Slowing the thoughts
In some parts,
But giving the other parts,
The nervous parts,
The parts that hyperventilate
And have panic attacks,
Caffiene.

Breathing gets hard
Because
I'm underwater,
Or underground.
Buried alive,
Or sinking slowly.

I.
Can't.
Breathe.

The worm,
The worst part about the worm?
It feeds on my life.

A young man returns home
To Hiroshima,
Where the bomb's been
Dropped.

There are imaginary lines,
Each for every ripple
Caused,

Each for every poisoned child,
Crisscrossing,
Intersecting,
Multitudes upon multitudes of
Lines—

In the thicket
He stands

Unmoved.
Avoided.

He can't help but
Notice the
Uninterrupted
Lines
Of his shadow

Spread out before him-

A body bag
Unopened.

Disillusioned by the open market,
he polishes his glasses and stretches,
running a hand through hair made artistic
by the blunt scissors of the philosophy major
who lives downstairs. It was a trade,
he tells me. Short back and sides for a batch
of macadamia nut cookies. Barter economy.
He mutters about measured value,
divides a piece of paper, and breaks a pencil
while forcing the verses of quarter sheet poems,
recounting the night he stole four sponges
from a craft supply store in town,
a drunken ****-you to the establishment-
but also, he admits, it was late and
he had to do the dishes.
If you want to see how big the world is,
he says, take off your belt. Now
tighten it to the usual hole, put it down,
and look. You are a speck of dust on
the wineglass of human existence.
Don't let it get to you. You are smaller and better
than you think. Another quarter sheet finished,
he slumps back on the defeated sofa
and reads me Desiderata, putting on airs,
grappling with devotions to poke holes in certainty
just as I do now to the worn leather strap,
shrinking my claim to the wineglass with each punch
of the silver awl, and after years, still waiting
for the clink of his belt buckle,
the moment when, humbled,
he remembers he is only
a child of the universe.

With her black eyeglass frames and sensible heels,
the psychiatrist is a contrived portrait of neutrality.
The timer on her desk ticks sickeningly,
counting off the missed opportunities for revelation
that pass with each minute.
I ask her if she has considered a Victorian fainting couch,
she does not smile.
I make cheap cracks about diet ads and the plight of the modern anorexic,
she scribbles something on a legal pad-
from where I sit, the only legible word is "questionable".
She is not describing herself,
yet I can think of nothing more dubious
than being paid to listen to another's tedium.
I spend one hour each week with my  hired companion,
and she, in turn,
spends her time relaying information
to another army entirely,
sending reports to the other doctors,
leaking statements to my family.
She is the informant, and I,
the gullible sap who believes in
"conditional confidentiality".
I pretend I know nothing of the arrangement,
and try to speed time by imagining alternate realities.
I picture her as a talking doll-
A string protrudes from her back;
when pulled, a mechanical voice says
"I see", or occasionally,
"How do you feel about that?"
I stifle a laugh,
and glance  over at her glazed expression-
there isn't much of a difference.

The café rumbles like the belly of a fasting saint,
voices competing with the clanks of silverware.
In the tearoom a boy with a tangle of wires
leaking from an unzipped backpack
struts between tables, billing himself as a "human hotspot".
He wears the same glasses you do;
they slip down his nose as he leans over to flirt with the waitress
in the red apron, who taps her nails against the cash register
and laughs at his bad jokes, she tells me, because
he wears his pants too high, just like her brother used to.

A man with a soup-stained button down and a bald spot
introduces himself as Peter Ling, proprietor,
oracle of the inner city rummage sale,
advisor to the lost and hungry.
He doles out pithy wisdom and lentils into mismatched bowls-
"You want therapy? Try your ex boyfriend."
The four of us hide our grins, and flee
to his cavernous basement. As we go spelunking
through the puddles left by a burst pipe,
clambering past bloated books and warped furniture,
Emma Miller swears that she slept here once-
on a moldy brown sofa crouched like a hibernating bear
among empty Heineken bottles.

The expedition yields four boxes of acupuncturist leaflets
and a damp antique suitcase filled with seeds,
who seized the opportunity to germinate,
their tiny roots searching fruitlessly
in the mildewed silk lining.
Ling says he's going to try gardening this year,
serve up spaghetti squash grown out back by the garage.

We sowed pea shoots and salad greens
in glass jars pilfered from a claw-footed armoire
that lay on its side, defeated, like the last of the saber-tooths.
I named one for you, tucked Eruca vesicaria sativa
into potting soil, and set it on the balcony railing-
tempting fate and gravity, because you always liked a little excitement
with your afternoon cup of rooibos.
I didn't see the girl who knocked you off your perch,
saw only the sun's sharp gleam off the glass
as the jar plunged, graceful as a slow-motion train wreck
on its arc toward the concrete,
and Peter Ling reached up with his big, calloused hand
to break your fall.