it was a kiss with coyote’s embouchure, with the river’s casket, with gelified venom, with the apron’s appetite, with compact distortion around portable lip cuffs, with trite lies liquified, with mud clumps in mercury clasps, with spit woven theses, with unwound ovoid wellsprings, with sun-hidden shadows, with the frayed nighttime squish, with closeted hand dice tossed, with chance in the fistfuls, with detuned static and bellyaching bramble, with losing yourself, with entropic dissociation, with fleeting tokens, with sayonara stamps, with honey pumping nozzles, with inside out stratus veins, with the pain of history tucked in the trail fringe, in the pebbles kicked outward, with fried abandon, with seatless balconies, with the touch of an insect unexpected while straddling a brick wall with electric grout, with eyelashes trimed by the wind, with patterns passed, with breathless shapes and shaping dimensions, without the taste of lavender or the mosquito’s lonely thirst, with time passing, with time passing, with time passing, without passing time, with the sky dumping elected dead bodies, with spoonfuls of miracles, with starvation kicking, with moon swells forgetting the fomite sea, with weather inside, with dry mouth drawer memories, with omens and herrings with teeth and tongue.

his siberian thoughts crowded among themselves, exiled as usual, until the internal dog pile formed a pattern, a calling. there was sense and it spoke of a redeeming moment, potentially wrestling his family from tuxedo executioners. it would be a journey south. his father left him a felluca that had been sitting icy and still in a frozen lake. using his breath, he thawed his vessel loose and sparked the dilapidated satellite phone for the last sixteen minutes of its batterylife. several hundred penguins armed to the beak in soviet weaponry. so it was decided. the man scribbled for days aboard his ship, while the world met demands to cease certain luxuries. at least the ice melting ones like driving and cocktails. the estranged siberian landed a week after his empyrean vision, and presented each penguin with jobs to start and end in different months for the next five years. he explained that life was about good or bad timing, and that now was not the time for mutually assured destruction. not with so much to be done. one penguin swept twice a day. two penguins were to have a wedding interrupted by a third penguin. young penguins would get in trouble and be forgiven. a council of penguins were to renew the program for another five years. they crowded around him, contemplating each of their roles while he stood with a feeling of being the closest home he'd been in decades.

taking in the darkness by mental synthetic aperture radar, i come across miniature tribes sharing among themselves a symmetric drawing of a mobile home on a Cartesian plane. one of the tribe sits running her tattoo gun along the skin of a candle. she is seriously ******* up that tattoo gun. they decide to build this mobile home, but the construction irritates my roommate. she says they must build their mobile home outside, it’s more tragic that way anyhow. she is right, the trudging-through-mud-and-rain story is riveting, though further scanning on my part reveals that fate intends differently. once outside, the darkness has to move inside, adopt hosts and appease some master i assume. the chewing of massive rodents under the porch sinks into the skin behind their ears. The tribe people all get wax tattoos of warnings, skulls, demon spells, inverted stars. the darkness invades them and becomes the wick. as the mobile home nears completion, my roommate steps out with the garbage. a loosened tuna can careens into the tribe’s escape pod. before the rats even twitch, the wicks light, catch fire and burn them all to a psychotic crisp. look what you’ve done, i say to my roommate, they had hope for certain freedom. she says the rats eat guilt free tonight.

a curious family of raptor children, a lake of caterpillar carcasses (boulder soup), a grocer for the taliban, gas powered anything, the exposed midsection of a tree, bank robberies or bear maulings in progress, triangles, an irascible bus driver thinking in isosceles, the itinerant story of a mama mammoth, starquakes and extinctions, massive roaches, a neck bath in hot breath, sudden abeyance from behind, the way gravity kills caterpillars and spares us because all angles of gravity make 180 degrees and this is stillness. fear running a straight line from behind us, through us, and in front of us. what i consistently get caught up in, the third point might be my final resting. this is why i ******* hate triangles.

sharpie bats lit against knotted wormy water in the fugue reservoir

wings caught and pinned on lonely patches of grass

her nightly squirming huffed and inked into jittery night critters

swarming her thighs

a bearded moth dazes off over the Gordian whitewash

pipes pumping a current of his brothers bodies

wet wings and carcasses, the lure of consequence

the bearded moth did not get too lost, sensitive to

the drawings of his furry devourers from the girl beside him

she says insects have never touched her blood

from the ether he thinks startling wing twitches,

punk echolocation, apologies learned not to be given,

touching water, even distribution of limbs

dripping disintegrating becoming the age of the earth

but the bearded moth

plays it cool and dries in the shape

of a man that looks apologetic. maybe honest.

she’s satisfied and sends a thousand

paper bats to rip apart the reservoir and

pull the grass closer together.

this is no one’s chance.

i keep two buttons in either pockets

they’re part of my usual pocket cluster, wallet phone keys headphones matches

both hands in my pocket now, i run my finger along the ridge of the left button on the hard days

i roll the bridge between both buttons before sneaking out back and pressing the right button

but like all psychoactivities, relative direction, cardinal hand eye, the right button looks identical to the left and I left them both on the table in between tobacco pouches and empty beer bottles

things that press the left button: ominous psychosis, soma mania, fire flushes from ******* not listening, an empty checking balance, an empty emotional balance, an emptiness

things that press the right button: herbal breath in the nice chair, glassy eyes and extra papers, a quiet hour in surround sound

I stare at the left button while my dad calls and hover over it, pausing mid drag to weigh the consequences, weighing the empty balance, feeling an overdrawn surcharge to my soul, taxed in tension, fumbling headphones

the left button sometimes makes me yell, dissociative silence or telling strangers to go **** themselves because I can’t afford the time for anything else

It’s usually the left button I smash against the wall, slaughtered, obliterated, my friends hand me broken batteries and shattered screens and say things like, “press the right button, stop pressing mine”

things that press the right button: not me, usually.

things that press the left button: the left button presses the left button, leaving me with a locked right button, pressed permanently and I fidget with a flathead trying to pop that ****** back out

why can’t I hit the right button?

why am I stuck with the left button, ad infinitum, added insidium, snarling and suffocated, shaking it out in the center of my bed

it might be easier if they left me in a blue gown, *** exposed, *** laid down, pressing that ******* button by the hospital bed, pressing that ******* button like I know how in the coward’s way out

irregardless of what button I press, or what gets pressed, or what’s pressing me and pressing against me, they find their way back into my pocket cluster

pockets with my hands, fingers that get skinnier until my fingers are thin lines or circles or buttons themselves and I have nothing left to do but give them to you and have you press every button, drugless and dampened

things that press the right button: you when I need you to

and when you press it, the left button and the right button are one in the same

they are you and you can withstand being pressed or being there to be pressed

out of my hands and a little lighter

i waited for you to

deposit bumble bees down my

throat with your mouth

they will safely disarm their stingers

and bring them all to me in a square envelope

‘shake it’ i tell you

the stingers become the poem i wanted to write

a really lovely one that tells you you’re a campfire warming my nose

that you’re pretty


it isn’t all roses though

it feels thorny somehow

yeah, i say, ‘i meant to take those out’


my throat and limbs are

fuzzy i say

but you find this, contradictory