inside: me,
standing on a stranger's pool table,
swaying to trap music like a ballad,
but humming an AC/DC song
to the cheers of
my fellow drunkards.

outside: men,
fighting in the pool
punching, splashing
smiling while grunting.
blood from a burly one’s lip
mixing with chlorine. I think
I spot a tooth floating around in there,
but it could be a trick of the light.

was a child when 9/11 happened
and i didn't care at all

was an idiot in school,
and a happy genius in the safety of solitude

was a ******* when i sold cigarettes to children,
so over-******-priced

was flipping off my teachers
and my father sometimes

i'm not like that anymore
i try to love people now

My dad's old friends came round to our apartment sometimes,
would come round for some beer
and a guilty look at my mother’s ***.

Today, as usual, she let them track mud through our little house, cackling like hyenas
and pretending to admire the art on our walls.
She let 'em do it but then we all went out on the porch and they started to tell me, as mama looked on with pursed, painted lips,
bout the time my daddy’d -
well i never ever did find out what my daddy'd done
*** that's when she slammed down the case of beer
on the patio table.

All three of them paused to look at her.
It was like she’d turned them all off, with a button that she kept hidden in her *****.
for a second they realized how sad she must've been,
they realized he probably shot himself right upstairs
and then they looked at me
like I was a dead little boy
wearing my daddy's eyes.

I missed their merry smiles and table slaps punctuating each joke
wiping the sweat off their foreheads with their wrists and
leaning back in their chairs, flicking their lighters against their cigarettes and
savoring mouthfuls of chewing gum and dip,
'*** now they were still.

“Now don’t go tellin’ tales to John,” she said, and doled out a few drip-cold beers to shut them up.

They washed the stories down with her drink and just forgot about it,
or more likely,
they'd started thinking about that button
burrowed between my mother’s *******.

silk & saffron cylinders basking in the still light
as thoughtlessly as a blue jay bathes in his bird bath
as a brave baby bites his mother's breast
as i watch you from a house across, you stretch silently awake
your rib cage glimpses the light for a moment, looking like
marks of fingerprints
but then they dissolve, disappear back into your brackish depths.

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 wide and white as snow against the unlit room
but still my sister couldn't see me staring.

who you wonder
is leaving love letters in the mail, envelope licked like its glue was being
tasted?
who, you wonder, is throwing rocks into your house of glass and
why?
why? i'm a ghost, woman,
and I need to **** something in you
to make me live again.

my head emptied
as though bathwater down a drain, and i became simpler:
than the children kicking and screaming and skinning their knees on mulch,
than the cars coming and going and crashing and catching dead bugs in their killer windshields.

suddenly, ripples were spreading gently through the sky
like it was a body of water, being stirred to life by the clouds
like they were the fluffy fingers of a kid poking at his fish bowl,
and i started wondering what a sky even was
and if it could be the ground
if i sought to somehow stand on it.

i sat in the grass, plucked out its longest blades
like i was a brush tearing hair from the scalp of the earth,
started weaving little green bracelets, like I'd done as a boy,
and i did it until the sun had started to go down,
unable to connect the sky’s slow setting
to a passing of time.

"i'm awful."
you say it like a plead,
like you're begging me
to disagree.
"i don't think
anyone's awful,
not even
lee harvey oswald,
dude was just
ill"
is not the answer
you wanted,
you're crying.
"you think i'm like
lee harvey oswald?"
what
no

poems are snippets of wasted time;
a collection is a shattered clock.
even a good poet
is a poor one
and especially doomed
when writing about writing.

We briefly stop arguing
five hours into the road trip;
exhaustion reigns
over resolution.
I lean my weary head
against the window
and lock eyes
with a French bulldog
******* mightily
on the sidewalk.
Its owner notices me,
furrows his brow,
and menacingly clenches
his grasp on a plastic bag,
which I assume he uses
to collect the dog’s waste.
I avert my gaze
and look anxiously
back at you.
You had been looking too;
now we are laughing.

good people travel together
in tamed wolf packs, tearing throats
for each other's sakes
because a good person will,
when left to his own devices,
carry bad ones on his back until it breaks.

an art museum learns all its works are fake
and renames itself the museum of forgery

another few pounds of coke are found
in another school teacher's house

a local boy's laughter
sounds like a cocking gun
so he gets shot in the head

"head over to mcchick’s for some grease poppin,
show stoppin chicken tenders
or some chill,
dead air

check out this
beige wall, y’all,
check out this
puddle of soda running through the clogged arteries of the tiled floor
who wouldn’t want to work here?”

“shut up brandon
you’re fired.”

you count our money
with shaking hands
we've got enough
to live comfortably
but not enough
to be better
"I've never had to live like this,"
haha
all right
come on, the realtor is not your therapist,
and by the looks of the off-color carpet this is not our house

"the pool was misshapen."
what about the other one
"kitchen too small."
what about
"can't afford it."
ha ha
well
ok, the tires cut into the road as we head on
the next one, you say, will be ‘lit’

hey, look
that ones for sale
"the crackhouse?"
uh no the normal
the normal house
"bad neighborhood,"
wow
must be hard
being
so good all the time
“i just want this to feel like a home!”
ha ha
well
i just want
a divorce at this point

Oh, *****,
the one I rode
in my old country abode.

Though of length you had a dearth,
I shan’t soon forget your girth,
the warmth of that width a stone-lined hearth.

To wrap my hand around your body
was a breeze; overall you weren’t too shoddy,
and I could hold you with such ease.

find a dream demon in the sizzle of your fried egg
in the fruit of your loops
in the balance
of your breakfast,
and swallow him
down with orange juice.

find him in your last pistachio
crack him open,
find him waiting,
find him
kind of hot

he looks real ripped,
red skin and
red tinted sunglasses.
“aw ****,
those gains,”
you wanted to say,
but were afraid.

wake up and find
that u lowkey miss him

I can see my friends' graves;
their names engraved
into unforgiving stone.
the flowers that Sherry's mother
will insist on bordering her date of death
are gaudy, and I can hear
the album Sherry puts on
when she hangs herself,
scratching out a death rattle.

I can see the bear
that mauls Matthew to death.
I can smell the sandwiches
he leaves outside his tent,
I can hear his sleeping breath
and my stomach grumbles
in time with the grizzly's.
Already, if I listen,
I can hear the lack of thought
pervading his comatose head.
at least the bear will finish him off
in a matter of minutes, and the pain
will be so intense that it is barely
pain at all; it's there, it hurts, but then
he's dead. I shake his hand,
I say, "nice to meet you."
he has
a firm grip.

Mike, it isn't you,
it's your heart disease.
And it's not that I'm not attracted to you, Skye,
but watching your entrails pour from a stab wound mid-coitus
kinda kills the mood.
I want to burn both my eyes out, Jenny,
so that I can't sea you drowning anymore.
Karen, I don't really care about you,
or your looming and eventually lethal diagnosis of type 2 diabetes,
so you can go ahead
and put your hands on me.

Hermit ***** sleep deep
piled up and closed-keep,
‘*** Hermit ***** need friends.
but if you ain’t a Hermit Crab
don’t give a Hermit crab an ‘in’;
for if you ain’t no Hermit Crab,
Hermit ***** will be your ends.

good old Geoffrey especially,
his Hermit shell an endless well of money.
you may be taken hostage
by his Hermit eyes of blinding honey,
but close those eyes against the sun
and he won’t even see ya, sonny.

watch out for them Hermit *****,
or they’ll watch out for you instead.
if you don’t watch out for Hermit *****;
Hermit *****
watch you be dead.

just trust me on this,
i’ve, long ago, been There.
I would not be sayin’ it
if I didn’t Deeply care.

you know the information now,
do with it
what you dare.

I met him at his house,
stuck the check in my bag,
so many zeroes.
“Large price to pay,”
said his wife, arms crossed,
not liking the idea
of giving a younger woman money
to go deep inside her husband’s body.

I sunk into the old man
as though he was a post-work bath,
and the pain rose off his surface in steam-like tendrils.
I stretched and widened
to completely fill the shell of his large frame,
and after a few seconds of adjustment,
twisted a clumsy hand
to test my motor control.
I slunk out of his rocking chair,
and tripped over his legs as I tried to walk,
plummeting face down
into cat-haired carpet.

The wife
was giving me the stink eye.
“Arthur?” she asked, stupidly.
I shook my head.
Meanwhile, my body blinked awake from the couch
and was overtaken by a large smile,
Arthur’s blissful grin looking
peculiar on my lips.
The old man,
inhabiting my body,
reached out a hand to glide against
his wife’s mechanically smooth arm:
“Come here,” he requested.
She made a face, said she’d be back
when we were done, and left.

Now it was just me and him,
or him and me,
depending on how you look at it.
We laid down on his bed together:
me because i’d become suddenly exhausted,
and Arthur to take
his first real rest in a while.

No matter how I adjusted the pillow,
My wrinkled head throbbed.

We tried to play cards,
but Arthur’s hands shook in a way
I was not used to
so we had to stop.
He kept thanking me over
and over and over and over as i replied:
it’s my job,
no problem,
it’s my job, no problem,
and rubbed away the aches
in my temporary legs.

When the session was over
he bolted out the door.
I couldn’t move without hurting,
but I didn’t need to chase him:
I called him and told him
if he didn’t bring my body back
I would steal his credit card
and his wife.
“Bodies are places to visit
but you can’t vacation forever,” I said.
When he returned he wouldn’t look me in the eye.
“I’m not really a thief,” he let me know.
“Okay,”
I said, skeptical,
putting my hand on my own shoulder
and cozying back into my body,
which was a little stretched out.

I could feel him watch me leave
in excruciating jealousy.

his brain is full of bugs.
he just woke up one day
and there they were.
the doctors can't tell him how they got there.
"do you
uh
leave your window open at night?"
yes, he says, sometimes. but how'd they get - he points to his head - in here?
"do you
uh
leave your skull open at night?"
he thinks about it.
I don't know, he says.
"how do you not know?"
in an X-ray of his brain,
they find flies, roaches
wasps, beetles
daddy long legs
and even
a praying mantis or two,
among other things.
one of the nurses
vomits all over her scrubs.
they give him meds for pain,
and he tells them that really it's more like an itch than a pain
but gets a prescription anyway
‘*** the doctors won't sleep that night
if they don’t do something.

when he tells his mother the news she is shocked,
tells him
that his father had bugs in his lips
that stung when they touched hers
and his father's father's fat fingers
were so fat only because
of all the butterflies.
"all the men in our family,
all of ‘em,
but when you hit 22 and I'd never heard
a single chirp of crickets from you
I was hoping."
she gives him a banana before he goes
*** he says he's hungry
from all the blood loss.

he soon gets his first serious girlfriend,
not the kind
he never calls,
not the kind
he tunes out
when she talks,
but the kind that tells him:
"I am so damaged I can barely love,"
and he stays.
he is the kind of boyfriend that,
when his ticks tick her off, and he says:
I cannot think
long enough to fix this,
because of the buzzing
of bees in my brain,
she will leave
without much hesitation,
because
who wants to sleep
next to a man and his mosquitos?

when I show him to you, your forehead
is enveloped in creases —
“he has to go,
he probably carries diseases.”

“But don't you like this guy?”
“I mean, he seems kind of useless,
and how will you feed him,
he looks kind of toothless.”

(this is when I knew
not to associate with you,
'*** you were absolutely
goddamnfuckingclueless.)

“Really…?” I ****,
to which you only nod.
I shrug: “Well, to me,
he’s a little green God.”

a baby's foot
mom's womb

the soccer ball
the shoe

store owner staring
at shoplifter

a *******
his wife

it kicks
in

Jeremy draws a snail on his lips,
so that he won't forget how to say the word.
"Snail," he says, twisting his tongue around the syllable.
after he meets a cute limbless baby, he punches his own arm
to appreciate his capacity for arm pain.
Jeremy sells his house for five dollars
*** he feels bad
asking for more.
He also feels bad
pirating movies,
but not stealing donuts
to regift to the homeless.
Jeremy loves his dog
but not his wife.
Jeremy's nice
in a weird way.

slimy snake sam. cold cruel callous. harbor hamwich hats. justify juxtaposed jam-wads.

There are stars in his fridge
that stink up his food
as though they are clusters of rotting milk chunks
amongst other junk.
No longer able to eat a meal
that doesn’t taste like outer space,
he gets so fed up he eats them,
and they taste so bad he pukes them.
Peering into murky toilet bowl water,
he can make out the faint twinkling
of a regurgitated star.

My cat has apparently
decided to turn my house into a graveyard for rodents.
They turn up everywhere -
my tub, my sink, my bed -
but they all look so similar
that it could very well be the same mouse,
finding its way back in
every time I throw it out.

My cat looks proud of himself.
I ask, “When are you gonna stop?” and
“Why’d you have to put it in the toilet?”
But he can’t answer
through a mouthful of mouse fur.

i asked for your 2 cents
you said "sorry dude, i'm broke"

you are the emotional equivalent
of an empty bladder.

you called me up.
it'd been a while
because i'd felt bad.
you needed help moving
out of that 'memory-infested
******' ****-hole' as you called it.
a rental truck stood in wait outside your house,
as did i.
we didn't wait long.
your face was the same, your body different.
your body screamed late night binge,
watching home videos
and crying into your takeout.
having a wife
and then suddenly not having a wife
will do that to ya.
you wiped a bit of sweat from your forehead
before it could gain traction
and trail down your face
like a salty
man-tear.
when we were done you looked exhausted,
and it was growing late,
but i was scared to leave.
"do you want a beer?" you said
so i think you were scared too.
we sat down on the couch, staring at the wall
almost pretending there was a tv mounted on it.
i resisted the urge
to tell you i was sorry,
*** who cares,
really, and
what if it killed the mood?
looking back
the mood was ****** anyway,
and i should've just hugged you.

Your fingers,
calloused
or soft
(I can't see
from here),
tighten
round your cart
and brush hair
from your face.
You look like
an oncoming ambulance.
You look like
your father
hates the life
out of you.
You pick out
a mango.

I am king
of Wal-mart,

sitting high
in throne of $70 wicker chair.

“ this is
my kingdom. “

the toy aisle
thinks me a tyrant,

the way I bend
and break its barbies.

“ son,
we have to get going, “

dad says,
so I exile him,

plastic sword pointed
to his back.

“ no more
of your shouting! “

I live here now,
ruler of spoiling dairy.

When did you first start loving soup?

He considers this. “When i was around six.”

What was the first soup you fell in love with?

“Chicken noodle soup.” He says this as if it is blindingly obvious, and maybe it is.

Do you have any aspirations, soup wise?

“I have really wanted minestrone soup recently.”

What is that?

“It’s like really good.”

Oh.

“Yeah.”

me, fossil
you, archaeologist.

it was some time in the mid 90’s and
i was six,
playing with one of those little plastic phones
when she beckoned me over
to her armchair,
which i was afraid of,
in fear it would swallow me
up like it did her,
but i climbed into her lap anyway and
she smoothed my dress,
held my small hand in her wrinkled one,
closed her eyes and
then opened them
at the last second.
she went still,
looking quite disappointed in herself.

mom whispered to me more than she prayed to god
about her first job and her secondandthird,
about how they found water on mars,
about the miracle of him coming back,
about “the doctors said you were dead
but here you breathe,
and if you are possible,
then so is he.”

she carried around
a bible in her purse,
“you never know
when you might need it.”
it was buried by Winn-Dixie receipts
and i’ve still yet to see her read it.

she drank salvation from a mason jar,
“this is
the blood of christ, you see.”
but it looked
a lot like wine to me.