I bake this cake when I want to **** myself.

In a way I started honing the recipe
so long ago I can no longer
even find a beginning or end.
I've just been standing here
in the same kitchen
measuring the same piles of
powder over
and over.
Slowing time
with balanced
machine wizardry.

Each drop of egg yolk
and dash of almond,
another passing thought
filling spaces between
each tentative sunrise.
Powdered sugar landing with such
precise inflection
it’s focused sweetness
echoes through the body like a sharp gasp

The gentle vulnerability
of domestic banality
reminding the nervous system
that humanity
has and will forever
be a collaborative effort.

A warm,
living document
on what mattered most.
What’s still flickering in the night
at the dark edge of everything.

My plan was to **** myself once I ran out of money
but now I don’t want to
and I’m so scared.
It’s 3 am again and I’m in the backstage
part of this world
between awake and dreaming
and want nothing more
than to live every minute of sunlight.

I know it’s a mess
and that’s scary,
but a little fear is natural in this ritual
as with all the others.
Now salve your hands
and move your wrists like mine.

Old things have strange hungers.
An ache that smells like apricots,
but comforts like laughter ricocheting
off falling snow.
Everything once familiar
appearing strange and unseen.
A half forgotten childhood afternoon
finally occurring right now,
stinging vibrant and tender
in the light of a wild pale yonder

The limbed machine of pain is taking form again,
waking from a sleep more glass than velvet.
It wants to walk in the desert. To hurt.
To long.
Dance light and low
to fading Disco music.

Something is on its way.
A wink shaped sound from the northwest,
laceworked with cold spring air and poplar blossoms
colliding to and fro
haphazarding the visage of a man.

When your life is forever defined
by a single action
it changes time.
Everything has something
to do with everything.
Even a sigh shakes like the hand of a normal man,
an idiot
but a brave one,
sending a long-way-home postcard from 3 am
to a first name he’s unsure
ever lived there to begin with.

They are someone's memories.
What difference does it make
if they’re mine
or not?
They're beautiful
true,
and will sing deftly
on the cold-eyed breeze.
That is all that matters.

Let the day start quiet
in short morning stillness
hands grasping for one another
through the hanging scent
of unfolded laundry and varnish.

Run errands together
revel in mundanity’s sweetness.
Grocery runs,
helping choose a new end table,
taking inventory of the threads left suspending our weight
so what’s been haunting us in past lives
can’t quite reach our necks in this one.

Even in fluorescent silence,
the motel bulb tan of an elbow
gracing a shoulder while rolling
over to adjust the curtains
feels stoically safe as a death mask
cast in burnt plaster
and bone.

There’s a specific number
you’re worth to one another,
but it’s a sum
you’d rather not say.

Every person
even if only once,
should take a moment
to lay out every
memory they’ve ever accrued,
each thing they’ve ever known
on the bare floor of a storage room
and bask a few moments
in their snap jazz hum.

Hot tea summer walks,
waterfalls to swim below,
singing to pets
in a window pane flat voice,
and home cooked meals
beneath dusted desert moons.

Mark each and every one
with a fresh scrawl
on a blank surface.
Capture their energy
just before it evaporates
from our plane.
In this way you can build anew with masonry
no longer hewn from pain,
exchanging old omens
for uneasy knock-kneed hope.

From this moment onward,
your world will no longer have space
for anything
less than a miracle,
no matter how small.
Moments so bereft of logic
that no other explanation is left
beyond them being
inherently
magic.

Focus so ferociously on the color of the leaves
each spring
and the wet uneven bumps in the corner of
your dog’s crescent nostrils
that you lose track
of all the reasons you never liked to spend time
at home in the first place.

Lose sleep if you must.
Stare at a person
in raw barren awe
at the fact any universe,
nonetheless our
universe,
could ever
create them.

Craft
hone
divine
a shred of hope
on which to cling
until there are no stars left above.
Backfilling gaps left by grey days
with good intentions
and proving to your corner of existence
that forever
can
and will never
fall silent.

Assure people they aren’t alone
and are deserving
of being loved
harder than they know how to accept,
until gravity
seems to shift,
grant them freedom in flight
to soar backwards through
all their dark winters
and bring back something sacred,
flickering in folded beauty
like glass taffy
drawn from moving water.

You’re going to wake up before your alarm most mornings,
and sit in the quiet
looking at the mess of dark hair beside you
feeling the same way every World War II pet owner did
standing in line for culling.

Cling to the skin whose name you know best,
breathing intertwined in the same area code for a moment.
Heavy and spare
like an ear bound to the melody of a song
you never got a chance to share.

There was never enough time
to learn
what to feel
seeing all those records
dusted down and illuminated.
Each in their own space
amongst the butterflies and jazz.

You know you’re weary. Nothing more.
Maybe that’s why you still shave against the grain
despite long ago having learned better,
and wonder if anyone else in the coffee line
can tell you’re suffering an unstoppable
irreversible fear.

Everything is always an amalgamation
unbound by chronological order.
The moments of light so real your brain starts seeing
raw symbolism in every breath.
Those are the parts worth keeping.
The things that never quite make it to past tense.

But right now your ears sound like the ocean,
roaring with blood. There’s an apocalypse outside
and you’re the first to hear it.
But you’re not dead yet,
because there’s no afterlife where she’d be here
or you there.

Stay awake.
Feel the air rushing out of the world,
peeling back time itself
to it’s barest final slice of silence.

Your parachute never opened.
You’re hanging like ribbons
in the trees.
Staring at her face
still framed by starshine,
and high desert green.

I’ve been angry so
so long
despite the cost,
it’s familiar warm
consistency
keeps biting back
each time letting go
crosses my mind.

Maybe it’s a worse version of myself
grotesquely missed
in those mornings I wake
free from fear.
Secure knowing
somebody can still
my rattling body
when I'm too bleary eyed
to spend another moment in the carpool lane.

Miracles,
no matter how well laid
slough back
toward a haze more binding
than comfortable.

Just close the door
when there's nothing left to be.

Generally speaking,
one should avoid transparent containers
when attempting to starve a fire.

If not adequately covered each night
they’ll start to remember,
it’s the dark which should fear them.

They’ll keep right on glowing.
Melt straight through their enclosure
and flee through the nearest open window,
to nestle amongst decamped cigarette embers
and hubcap shards.

Or rush East.
Shine bright in an oxygen flood,
resting just a moment
before collapsing into morning.

No one ever goes searching anyhow.
Once it’s tasted wild air
a spark knows it has no business hiding
or obeying.
It just goes right on burning,

After all, our blood is mostly heat.
A pulsing canter of something primal.
Craving variance in structure,
the unspoiled viscera
it can hear cowering
just beyond the muscle and sinew.

An empathetic sanguine resolve
who without temperance
would course hot enough
to petrify marrow
reclaiming it’s rightful domain.
in a grand gesture shaped
and honed from spurts of desolation.

A constant flux of beautiful half memories
almost touching a better place.

Instead of slowly building a tonal
palette across months
years even
spend your minutes hours days
gathering the main threads and loose ends
of a life’s oeuvre
into a tapestry brilliantly feral
and unknowable.

Tack it by the roadside
where the asphalt leads back
to lost dreams so beautiful.
Where those you cherish most
are already looking back from a future
where nothing quite worked
but some unexpected air
still managed to find it’s way
into the digital chatter claustrophobia.

Learn not to worry
and hold close the absurd mystery
of your hands hands
never quite forgetting to
search for a familiar shape
in every darkened room
beyond the space set aside
for dreaming.


Never forget to repeat yourself endlessly,
endlessly
endlessly
endlessly
when the subject
is love.

I wish you wouldn’t picture me so cruelly.
Or at least do so quietly,
if you must.
Pull close the curtains
when using my image to self-flagellate,
feign disposability,
fester contempt,
and recoil at every name
I never once thought to call you.

Words miles
from loving, words
not truly about me.
Never tragic
poignant,
or even any of my business.
Rotating quietly amongst the broken dishes
slammed doors
and cracked disposable razors
growing in every doorframe.

Every action leading to those moments;
specific
incidental
and unique
could never quite be traced back to conception
for the weathervane has turned
and cannot be undone.

In so many words
I’m still thinking
softly of you
and know better
than to ask why.
But right now,
my hands don’t feel
any less empty
in the morning quiet and
I wish I could be there with you
right now
to give you one more solid kiss
before I can’t anymore.

Each night
the sun goes down,
starts a fresh set of
coercion,
to return again
and let the birds scream
sharply, from spindly branches
at the squirrels somersaulting beneath.

No moment is free from little negotiations.
When you buy a house
or vehicle
it could be the one you die in.
So we agree
to avoid bridge abutments
and unmonitored open flame.
Dig a peace deep and
wide enough to maximize
the amount of breakfasts we see.

Once we understand people
can actually be gone,
wrap our head around the idea
there must always be
a never again, nothing
tastes that permanent
anymore.
A resting locust in the back of our minds.

We can see the ridges of handwriting
left on the backside of blank pages,
peer through the seams
until the ink
muddles
and merges.

Still, the moon hangs too splendid
to never see again.
Forcing a primal expertise at plain-sight
hiding. Burrowed in the desolation
pyre. Palms outstretched
as if cradling a child,
skin blistering in the shade.

Growing up on a steady diet
of physical fear
and old Country songs
coalesces a taught wire
of rage and wallowing
forever lashed to a survival fetish
no one ever asked to be upheld.

Ubiquitous anger is just sorrow
aspiring to a loftier identity.
It hides amidst the panic
of what the wielder might do. Pushes away
when craving empathy
we don’t feel will be delivered,
If no one is ever
given a chance to show up,
it’s because
they’d have never done so anyhow.

So we start wars intending to die
but keep coming back
like the pain of teenage nihilism once you realize
everything you ever thought
was true
came to fruition.

There's a certain point, where
your hardships and pain
belong to no one else.
While you were busy locking your feet in place and
manipulating the same wet rag
wrapped around your heart,
living still needed to get done.

However we can still find that darkness
blocking the way down the hall
and hold it’s hand intensely.
Not placating to buy time,
but the real kind of empathy. The blistering high lonesome sound
of bones cracking with a smile
under the weight you were never
asked to shoulder.

When a dying man asks
if he’s going to be ok,
never say yes,
but be absolutely certain
to never tell the truth.

Some days all I do
is stand quiet in my kitchen,
staring blankly
while I burn.

Truth be told
I could stand to burn hot bright blue
sweat out some sickness,
lose just a little more of me.

Our hatchet got buried
in too shallow of ground
and I’ve worn out the linoleum pacing,
waiting for you to realize
there’s nothing new of me left to find.

But when you remember the shape of my name
nature courses wild
through your burnished sawtooth voice
and makes me forget the flames are real.

So I’ll keep singing you stories from my wire cotton throat,
about buried bouquets
sewn tight under the hot sun’s blade
praying for rain.
Hollow jaw beating time like a tambourine.

Until all that’s left
from the days I’ve scraped along
is a stubborn bridge back to past tense truths.
Hope it falls,
hope it can’t withstand a breeze.

Time still may come creeping
like a middle aged man
who can’t remember
the day his last son died,
but knows there’s not a single word
he didn’t mean to say.

Back when conversations
now short,
were once not quite,
so short.

It's summertime down here,
wind rippling through livestock
and laundry hung air.
Though the evenings have been
particularly heavy
with flash flooding
this past week or so.

Each morning I rise earlier and
earlier. Mending fallen fenceline
and digging drainage for the chicken coops
until the horizon light inevitably fades
to a dusted nothingness.
Without street lamps
anything past dusk is too rigidly dark
for much else beyond the campfire's edge.

This is likely the most at home
I’ll feel anywhere
since I gave up
pretending you're ok.

So I spend the evenings listening
to the frogs dancing
in the creosote scented rain,
hoping you'll find a way
to get ahold of me
if you change your mind
about me
letting go
of you.

People,
they’re made up of all the things they’ve done.
Like an early love letter resurfaced
during an ugly custody battle.
The only true takeaway
is how much has been lost.

What we refer to as present
exists only in the context of futures
which never arrived.
Often containing just enough time
for a single dream.
Not the kind where we learn a single thing
approaching profundity, but the kind spent
sweating, waiting
for the sun to tell us it’s finally over.

Lives are only ever lived parallel.
Adjacent neighbors in the same drafty apartment. Walls thin
enough to hear someone hitting their children, but without
the clarity to sort out
which door they’re cowering behind.
So we wait it out, and apologize
to a tiny corpse
until nothing is left but bone.

In my spine I can feel the season
about to change.
We should step outside and look at the sidewalk flowers
while we still can.

Only a certain type of person
can not feel
the obligation of a previous impulse.
Empathy unable to project,
so the knowledge just cools and settles.
Tightly filed away
with strangers
and ghosts.

Instead,
those reassuring idiosyncrasies
come together,
fill out a single consciousness.
Little pieces of oneself
left behind in others.
Like being informed of fresh snow
only by it’s passing.

The most ordinary
can be given extraordinary weight
if you're willing to go there,
dissolve into another space with a stranger.

Saying I love you goodnight
as a farewell.
Exchanging fragments of a finite existence for
objects holding just a fraction of how long
someone spends in the back of our mind.
Using a thumb to draw shapes
on the hand we’re holding.

Picking up the phone when someone
who used to love you calls.
Neither one lying
next to a reason
not to answer.

Construction of everyday moments
as monuments
to a time more boreal.
A calmness you can’t help
but immediately notice.

Starting down a path with someone,
who will never tell you where to go.
It’s your choice to move forward
amongst the brittle nettles
and grey
cloaked and mysterious in the weight of birdsong
and footsteps.

Soon the time will get away
you will no longer recognize her
or yourself
or us or
them.

I’ve been running down
this snow covered road
For fourteen miles
with arrow heads
pierced through
the bridges of both feet.

Extremities turning blue to black
I can’t turn back now, face it.
Twelve inches overnight
they said,
We reap what we sew
they said.

A whisper ran beside me
Running off
the road - to the woods
I followed -
until our bootprints
reached the lake

Frozen almost to the center
I laid down. Made snow angels.
Looked up at old light
dancing behind the trees.


I hope the ice cracks reach me,
before the rest of them do.

I wonder still
if you remember me as I was.

So obsessed with fixing
amending
undoing
setting things right.
Never content repeating the moments
already achieved
because to change them
even in the slightest
would collapse like tobacco embers
in a thriftstore coffee mug.

An attic hiding
entire generations
of days never not
filled with ghosts
hanging dusty over
your sleeping head.
Specific
incidental
pain over
and over and
over

Sometimes I think of those days
and hope the sun
still pops out
wherever you are.

I spent all night
on the dock of the man-made lake
turning my lucky
yellow stone
over and over
like words that died too early in the lungs.

I remembered waking to you crying
telling me how you felt trapped
and didn't mean to lash out
but were stuck between
not imagining a world
where I didn't exist,
and the feeling of extra air pouring
through an unoccupied passenger window.

Even the hardest love
can't outfight the infinite,
and my echoing voice will collapse
like young frost,
long before it reaches your cheek.

When you one day wake shouting,
at a shadow no longer mine
I hope you never forgive me.

Time exists all at once.
It compresses, bends
squeezes
sprawls lithe across
familiar rhythms
but inevitably
unstoppably
will always land upon us.

An infinite cache
of insignificant moments
where we share the same songs
over and over
with every new face
hoping they'll eventually mean
what nostalgia has convinced us
to be an indefatigable truth.

We're all supporting characters
supporting
supporting characters.
Holed together in a cabin belonging to everyone
and no one,
losing life left unused.

Sometimes all there ever was,
was a single day.

Statistically speaking,
most of us don’t get to say goodbye.
In either direction.
So as a mitigating factor we sacrifice
experience, push away
maintain
an odd pathology
of loneliness.

Or we humanize things
as a coping mechanism for The End.
You’ll tell yourself with full certainty
how much your cat must miss you,
in order to avoid
the primal,
animalistic understanding
that we will all one day
go suddenly
and without warning.

Along the way
a few things
will slip into your consciousness.
Much like how your uncle brought back
shivers from the war,
but left the rest
at the Front.

You'll visit the same smoke shop
every other day.
greet the same counter girl,
joke how the energy drinks you buy
will do more damage to your body
than anything else in the store.
Notice her new piercings
and tattooed freckles,
walk out promising you’ll see them tomorrow with smirk.
Then one day you'll move away
and never think to say farewell.

Or find the shop closed up
after spending a week out of town.
Nothing left save for a few garbage cans
and empty boxes
on the other side of the open sign.

The more you look at them,
the more they start taking on
a human form, an identity
like they’d been
kicked shoved punched
in the gut
cast aside until a city worker calls to have them disposed of
by the department
who handles such things.

Dreams thrive fervently
in the middleground
between
raw gossamer shores and
sullen building
cramped days.
Hushed pleas of belonging
lingering in humid air
nourished yet disoriented
never quite calibrating
to fleeting happenstance
faltering gently across years.

Small mercies creasing
long hellos
short goodbyes
and bathwater moans.
Dice refusing to roll
twice by the time
minds can be made.

The quickening pulse
of a world ending
not just here
but everywhere.

She's standing on a platform
in the middle of
the middle of nowhere.
Watching trains crest the treeline,
the same way she stands in the shower
until just before the morning's heat runs out.

Human humility, gravelly
and low, suggests the balance
of power is blurrier
than established hierarchies.
So diffuse there's no longer distinction
between center and margin,
fore
ground and back
ground.
Sinuous instead of rigid,
****** instead of embalmed.
Skeletal tangles of our murky balladry
disintegrating to hellish echo
like birdsongs
wilting in the sunrise.

Heart is a risky fuel to burn,
but look how the flame holds tight
until the shadows chip away
just enough for her ungoverned
wilderness
to creep back quietly.

Finally seeing everything again,
like dark water through trees.
and falling in love with the idea of
never,
hardly even lasting forever.

I bring myself,
to your altar
open and ambiguous
focused softly with an underpainting
of dark teal blue.

Staggering in a self-conversation
neither entirely conscious
nor fully verbal.
For a moment
it quiets me just to be there.

Even as the photo fades
I would not forget
the brilliant seasons
where from your side
for a moment
there was but a single silhouette
for the three of us.

Moving ever forward
occasionally
I took note of brief glimpses
of beauty
burning magenta bright
in the damp corners of my mind
back behind where the cattails
grow.

No words were said
but I heard them in your way
felt them in the clear
cold wind
lurching west behind the sun,
mottled leaves holding hands
with tatters of perspective scattering
like boxelder maple
across the slowing water.

While you worried on
making a choice of how to best
spend your next
day thinking
about
your next
day,
the message had already unfolded
like the key to a home
not yet built.

You've been given time
somewhere in the sky.
She wears your colors
draped delicate
as a rough sung song
learning to stagger
into a gallop
in air further
than you've ever breathed.

The moon whines.
Your vision blooms.

Ears flatten
at the primal cries
howl across dark water.
For a moment his eyes peer beyond
the warmth of the doorway,
almost catching focus of
their sharply glowing eyes.

Hair flattening back,
he looks back to his well worn mattress
and steps sharply away from the night
wet muzzle still bristling
from the riverside smoke
and windswept oak.

I cradled you in my arms
as you wept
Not just for your loss
but for the all encompassing miasma of it all.
There was nothing to listen to
between clipped
wet
gasps.
So I felt it all,
absorbed as best I could
to temper the weight on your tiny
bowed shoulders
while the dogs paced confused circles
unsure how to best offer support.
Tried to provide condolences
for which past, present,
future you
had so desperately yearned.

Maybe you were doing the same.
Processing all the tears I was never allowed,
never knew how to purge.
Pulling the screams stuck inside me
out with hands so small
I was always amazed at how
they could ever hold
so much.

Perhaps we've always been right there
since time's beginning
and will remain so
at the end
wrapped tight in thick hair
and saline
unsure of the next epoch's dawning.

You are in danger.
There are no stars.
Only a wild sky shocked red
by a beauty found only in the blood of the enemy.
Everything else lost never to return.

Honor, integrity, and hope all drowning in the blood I’ve spilled.
An ancient menace. Narrow, powerful, and sharp.
Even after your eyes are plucked,
you will never forget what you’ve seen.

Close your heart to their suffering.
Do not allow yourself to feel for them.
Close your heart to their desperation.
They will not feel for you.

Find your way home, for no longer does such a place call to me
Not screaming any more, but I can still hear them.
Death happened here.

Know this now,
you will never walk in sun again.
Erase the light.

Eggs crack where truths
must emerge
like a nameless sound
resonating in your home
just soft enough to avoid
being named.

You want to listen
dream
smile
hurt.
Not stuck
in the photo of you
holding the same photo
of you

One copy as proof
you were ever here.
The second, a reminder you've
always been
every new
you.

Your name still hums,
shimmering
magenta bright forever
in a glorious world
of tourmaline
and glass.

Most of our time is spent dead,
or not yet born.
An endless nothing heaped
atop more nothing.
Like being the first person
in the history of the world
on the timeline God abandoned.

Until one day you
feel someone approaching
glance a smile so small
it’s almost not there,
and the whole universe bulges and cracks.

A warm needle
plunged through an aging ghost,
shuddering breathless
in a crumbling foundation
of foxglove and mid-morning traffic.

Last night the specter that stands in the dim light
by the loose fence post
woke me,
and pointed East to Split Rock Lake.

My yellowed headlights peeled through the fog,
outlines of building frames collapsing until
that old shed next to boat launch
was the last thing standing.

There are no stars in the sky here.
There is no sky.
Only mossy air so thick it blurs every outline,
just enough
for dreams to fill in all the wrong details.

As my door opened, the dome light caught on
a bramble of soaked tulle floating
out under the moon,
framing your head the way boxer fractures build
mountain ranges in the backs of wind-dried hands.

But you were smiling in all that dark blue.
Staring through a teetering past
ruined present
and all the moments in between.

For a moment you looked like real hope.
Carved from sinew, metal, and glass.
A muted Whippoorwill warbling just before the horizon
goes wild and red.

Or the rushed ******* in a bathroom
because shaving your head
was the only thing that made sense anymore.

But you weren’t drowning as far as I could tell. At least not until your lungs remembered to breathe.

Some days are good.
Most are screamed into a strip-mall parking lot spilling over with Midwest rain.

But right now,
your feet are furrowed in cattails and algae
living the life left hanging for you
on the edge of a tall Southward wind.

For one reason or another
the Sun seems to still move
compact and deliberate
with clear trajectories of melody and
form in purposeful
motion until it’s just a few
feet from the horizon,
landing on my neck
with the soft
expansive warmth
of loneliness.
Like chewing on dirt
in the soft bed of infinity.

Somewhere,
not here,
a gallery of mislaid futures lie abandoned
on lonely highways of America.
An epic laceration to the very
heart of the world
from a day all the wheels slid loose
and the stars dropped away
leaving the moon to throb
it’s dusty pale light
and unmask the world
revealing dim fragments of lovely forms
hidden like burning black oak trees.

Nobody saw the accident.
One day everyone just woke up
and started breathing in road.
Watching lines of nearly broken men
marching ever onward from the wound.
The unsteady
steadying
the unsteady
in a paperclip labyrinth
where reality
gets in the way of dreaming

It’s late
and will only get later,
but I will still wake up
with things to
tell you.

By the time you receive this
we’ll be gone
several dozen times over.
Destroying more than just ourselves
warping the light
and air
with a single turn of the world.

My body is already breaking.
aching jaw leaking flame,
like an angel suddenly forced to live
the incredible loneliness
of being human.

An endless hallway
where nothing stares back,
save a whimpering rope
dangling from a support beam
burning boundless in the sun.

Gasp back awake
for even in your dreams
we all share a single name.

Growing up I used to watch the neighbor girl
as she sat silently in her backyard
once the evening air cooled down.
We used to be about the same age,
but she’s older now.
Mama said she was ill.
Thought she heard ghosts in the FM radio static
like conversations made of crushed metal
echoing throughout her house for years.

Perhaps out of cowardice
more so than fear,
I kept secret
the fact I could hear it too.

It would start slow with a feeling
that I tried to shape into sound
until I could feel the words
aching like a phantom limb,
not motivated by promise of meaning
or destination,
but by an impulse to simply hear fragments
of the vast expansive despair
dripping on the other side of our world.

Before moving to the part of town
with better schools
I saw her one last time
sitting on that old picnic table
letting the sprinkler mist draw her outline
on the splintery wood planks.

She turned suddenly
faced me in the dark,
her hands cupped gently around a mysterious glow,
something ineffable,
a grief too big to be named.
Without a word
she sang a bellow to the parapet pines.
Not so much terrifying,
as hopeful,
bending the world between us
until it simmered and groaned.

Later, eating pizza amidst the moving boxes
I asked Mama what the neighbor girl’s name was
and if she was homeschooled.
Mama looked through the door screen,
with a slow acceptance.
There’s no one
here.
Now go wash up.
We’re leaving before morning.

Beyond the shadow you settle for,
there is a miracle illuminated.
Brutally elegant,
nestled in communal catastrophe.
A dark star
of rapt silence and intimacy.
The kind that can quiet a room.

Every word is an edge.
Textures, traits, shapes,
gestures left smoldering in the air.
An incandescent slice of fat
hanging on a glint of enamel
after breaking up a fight
between stray dogs.

I don’t miss it.
it lives on my nightstand
with the other pieces
I’ll never be ready to let go.
After all, very little
can mean a lot
to the right people.

It’s not superstition if it works.
Maybe I’ll never understand.
Maybe I don’t need to.
Because right now you’re looking up at me
like you’re remembering who I am.

For the tirelessly articulate
a loss for words
is the greatest freedom of all.

Having never done it before
body and mind do not know
how to die gracefully.

A process marked by desperation and awkwardness.
Half conscious,
hobbled by oxygen depletion
and an sinister incredulity
that the end is actually happening.

If the dueling forces of unease
and temptation
in dust left unstirred could still save you,
I’d dredge you from the creeping harsh stillness.
Lay you out on a soft wooden surface
weathered to graceful perfection by time
and divine a map
between the concrete troubles
around us
and the turmoil within.

But bark don’t make a wound
or ease the path of our farewells,
for a choice
without the presence
of another
only exercises
the power of reclusivity.

Go ahead,
resolve our plot
pick anything.
Something more intimate
than a secret.
Unafraid
to be around
a little less often.

Anything other
than stepping over newspapers
and knocking on the door,
to no answer.

So I keep knocking,
while you keep
not
answering.

I hear singing,
wait not singing,
so much as vibration
coming from this place.
Strange as whales in the deep.

Somber and embarrassing.
Like looking down the street
just after walking out on the person
who meant the most to you.

Or letting a parent’s final call
lapse to voicemail
in defiance of the end
long ago built into every beginning.

Nothing driven by nostalgia
will ever truly satisfy us.

So we cling to what we know.
Shaving against the grain of our own salvation
with the heartbreaking clarity of
a raw summer night.

As if the unreasonable silence
of each footstep
lets the world become a little more itself.

I thought of you today,
and felt a burst of energy like a wound.

When I was smaller
I used a short ledge
in my closet
as a secret library
and on rainy nights
slept beneath my coats
and unused dress shirts
as the lamp slowly
dimmed to nothing.

From the kitchen window
I watched a broken tailed pigeon
hopping uneasily from shade patch to shade patch in my backyard.
The mundanity of irreversible pain.

The dogs stood perplexed at the door
since it wasn't fleeing,
or exhibiting any self-preservation for that matter,
as the others typically did.

He was rather plump,
suggesting some manner of avian royalty,
as the desert doesn’t typically afford strong nutrient sources
for most species.

Water was unnecessary.
But to not provide
even a small dish, seemed
a taciturn snuffing of a long stale flame.

There was no further assistance to offer
beyond keeping the dogs at a wide berth
while I finished wiping down
the peeling linoleum.

When I returned for the dish,
he was entirely gone.
Without so much
as a tuft of flight feather left behind.

‘‘I was always skating on wet glass.
Always had this anxiety.
Tension to never be able to relax,
Never knew from moment to
moment what was the rule.
I have been balancing
on a tightrope in this home.
Sure I wanted to take the reins.
End it myself.
But I couldn’t face the thought
that I would be spared,
but the little ones left behind.”

In intimate partner violence
the head,
neck,
and face.
Are the most commonly injured body parts
with most occurring
on the left side of the face
as 90% of the population
is right-handed.

Strangulation is of specific note,
as it induces behavioral and emotional reactions
which in turn facilitate coercive control
via fear, inability to effectively resist,
and prostrated trust.

Consciousness can be removed in seconds,
brain death administered in minutes.
Even weeks afterwards, the risk of
carotid artery dissection,
stroke,
and seizures
persists.

Even stable appearing survivors
free from obvious marks
are not free of morbidity
due to the abundance of internal injuries.

Oftentimes without
subsequent violence
an abusive partner can forever exert
and maintain control.

An unfiltered pretension and paranoia,
reeking like empty coffee pots
on hot burners,
smoldering in humiliation
of a night
that will never dawn.

You gesture gently
to soothe the birds
and amazingly
you do.