Sometimes there is nothing more to say. Sometimes I am the only

one left in the middle of the world of billions of people. Some-

times I’m Big. Sometimes I’m really really small, smaller than

the tiniest bug below God’s good earth.

I think it rained that entire summer. At least that’s how I remember it.
The air was wet and thick as the skin of a plum. Mold grew everywhere it could-
in the cracks in the floorboards, in the mailbox with the spider-mother,
between the pages of the poems you read to me on the porch.

break me open for all to see. strip me
bare. slice me deep. carve me
to the bone.

There’s a chain. It hangs from the pulley. It clangs in the night.
Where a link once broke, it has since been mended
with thick coiled wire, teased at the end like a doll’s braid.

Tonight, the flesh acknowledges its episodes of panic.
How often it has bred a populace of anxieties & silenced

the aftermath. I uncork a Jack Daniels, nearly fill
a glass, address the glass with an interest that only

a pair of hungry eyes can afford.

first, it was an awkward elbow-bump
the kind of greeting that happens when both parties acknowledge
We have dirty hands

I’ll weigh plums, squeeze avocados
and all this time my son won’t be there

or anywhere. Or out there somewhere
eight-balling his way to heaven.

no use in fighting now
just glide baby
glide everywhere
no steps in the codes of silence

I'm waiting for the UFO's. But you don't

know that. You don't know

Anything. What you know is what you knew.

And still other days, I embrace the silence
lingering around his brushed on blue-eyed gaze,
like the one dinner we shared.

Let’s agree on something small
enough to pocket when we tire
of fondling its many contours.

Her grass didn't stand a chance
because it was made from dust
and after Grandpa Joe died
that's just where she waited to return.

i have never been a paradise.
a similar landscape, i'll admit.
but i’m an entirely different temperament.

Because alone is too hard,
she scans her bookshelf
pretending to be someone

I used to live in a house with 25 people
The house next door had 25 people
Sometimes I lived next door too

I wondered if my weight would pull me through the bed beneath me
the earth blanketing me
as I sank.
Darkness with the squinting fade of starlight.

Holidays in Paris, we could pay no mind to the ossuaries

Dine with strangers and dribble ribald speech over wine

Youth was wet and sanguine

I watched Midsommar yesterday
I liked when the guy from We’re The Millers peed on the ancestral tree
And how the Swedish lady cut off his face

And from just behind,
the arrows of yellow cabs
shoot back and forth through her heart,
shoot all the time she is singing,
and the cigarettes, out through the glass,
seem aimed right at her feet.