We tell others,
It’s just a herb.
We smile with dorkiness,
And our yellow teeth. 

You slept with too many men curled like a spoon, frugal with their touch, but not their post-coital whimpering. By morning, they had sunk underwater

In a locked ward, an old nurse with grainy voice,
feeds her warm oatmeal cookies,
weans her from IV liquid dreams.

summer
scar
appearing
again
on
the bridge
of my
nose

Yesterday, you sat on the porch with your scotch and waited for the sun to go down before lighting a cigarette and turning on the radio.

While reading the Age of Innocence
I stumble upon a curious
Japanese doppelganger

Kurasawa and his man
Toshiro Mifune in
an old samurai movie
a classic
like Edith’s novel
but the two might as well
be Martians to each other

But I have a little more whiskey
and therefore a chance.

around me, the snores,
the window tree,
its overgrown slap against glass,
the scamper of tunneling mice,
the quake of the diurnal
in their murmuring beds,
moon’s spider-leg progress
across the wilds of the ceiling –