dear me, where to begin?
a chasm appeared in my backyard;
a cavernous crevasse, ******* in surrounding squirrels.
the grass around turned brown and marred
and our oaks fell to the underworld.
by force of fussy gravity, my heavy wife was hurled
into this ceaseless cavity, junk food for earth unfurled.
i gasped - alas! - my gal won't even get a hearse,
and curse that cursed concavity,
but perhaps i made it worse.
what should i do?

-desperate in detroit


dear desperate,

thank you for writing in.
that hole (inside your heart) must hurt.
heed my sage advice, good man:
fill that big guy up with dirt.

-wisdom william

good
morning
eggs
frying

milk
*****
babies
crying

drool
*****
m­ommy's
dying

silk & saffron cylinders basking in the still light
thoughtlessly as a blue jay bathes in his bird bath
as a brave baby bites for his mother's bare breast
as i watch you from a house across, you stretch awake
your rib cage glimpses the light for a moment and
dissolves, disappears.

i knew i was unseeable first when i was five
watching my mother undress for him and then him and then him
and then again when i was fourteen when my eyes
were white as snow against the unlit room
but still my sister didn't-couldn't see me staring.

i'm a ghost, woman,
and I need to **** something
to make me live again

you make me feel like a sidewalk worm;
a toenail clipping; a new york rat.
you make no sense at all;
you make bad lasagna;
you make bad decisions;
you maybe thought we had something great going
but sometimes great things end:
blockbuster, britpop, the TV show Friends.

happy birthday,
by the way.
call me back
when you get this.

I saw her picking out a cantaloupe
inspecting squeezing considering
thinking it'll go bad
before she can eat it
but still throwing it in her cart.
I followed her to the register and
watched her pick a pack of gum.

I wanted to ask her name
in my dream that night it was Elizabeth
we danced in a country-western bar
though I’ve never been to one before
so my dream-brain conjured it wrong,
empty and smelling inexplicably
of oven-baked cookies.

we were salsa dancing to techno,
and everyone but us were bears,
but the point of it wasn’t accuracy;
a dream is no documentary.
we’d stopped to catch our breath and she’d looked at me,
opened her mouth to say something,
reached her hand towards mine and
I’d barely,
briefly
felt the cool of her fingers on the back of my hand
before I woke up
in a much darker place.