Month: April 2026

Everything changes         Deeper woods    To find wild        More secrets

Parties      In abandoned train cars           Drugs          Exotic birds        Extroverts      Bad tattoos

You left me       on the side of the road          I’m misremembering        I’m lying        A fight

You ditched the motorcycle           You ran       into the woods      We’re not       Kids anymore

I didn’t     Follow you       Asshole sometimes      Black leather jacket 

Me and an acoustic guitar          Can’t you tell I’m sensitive           When it’s convenient

Over-narration and disappearance       Word fumbles       Inarticulate sky inside out blue

Moss stained        with blood drops          Body dragged to       Edge of road      Almost dead

Haunted through and through          Reverential owls         Why owls         Owls      Always watching

Hooting ill-music       You shouldn’t remember      Let it go      It’s gone        Donna we need to talk

Does your shape
have little legs sticking out

appendages going nowhere
a goggled eye or crooked fin

a comb-shaped hairdo
or a bit of a saggy muddle

around the middle
or what?

Let that shape express
itself and relate

to the other shapes
on the canvas 

You can construct the shape
sharpen up its boundaries

build a little bridge
from one shape to another

• 

Thinking in mineral tones
& earth pigments

Yellow ochre dreams of
burning all the others

with her golden eyes
& her milky voice

Unlongingly she puddles
on a plate    She’s just 

sunning

blast it all. blast bruisers
and bullies. blast blighters.
before the bend in the road
blueskies were boring, but
I beg for blue now. I’d barter
my boy to be able to breathe.
my firstborn. it’s a baffling
badness. not mine–but I’ve be-
held the abandoned, all bicker
and bite. Botched babies who
burble in bassinets, bright
bulbs of blank, brimming with
barbarism. It’s rank. Who will
bring up these brawlers? Before
they grow bigger than a bread-
box, they’re brutal.
                                        Birds ebbed
first, then butterflies. Bacteria
bloomed, buckets of bitter, 
barrels of bile. I’m beyond
believing in better. Beauty
is broken. The boys–
bellwethers, beasts. 

Spin swerve       Gone summer        Dragging bikes  uphill       Downhill     so fast

Legs unable     To keep revolution   Spread out      Rims spinning       The accident

Don’t talk about     Soil becomes      blood         Was that the first time

Death      wasn’t vocabulary    Dumbfounded in dim light       Extended days

You held     My hand       Tears and snot     On your shoulder      Remember how

We hated adults    You and me against         What was it     We were against   

Growing up         Looking stupid     No Faker    Underneath     the Douglas fir   

Skirt of moss      Distant sounds   of swimmers      in the pond    Wasn’t it a lake 

Cold birth        Summer weather     sweating in autumn sweater       leather satchels 

Divided dreams   decoded diary entries    lily stains    Something what   This way comes    

Used to be all forest      Flannel shirts and duck boots       Fancy cafes     Recommended photo spot   

What happen    To our days       off-filter fun        Erased landmarks       You changed

now I wish I’d gone even more pedestrian

photo-flash of morning lightning
their “no, you go” at intersections
my jaywalking on diagonals
hopscotching twigs and worms
movie-set rain (wind through wet trees)
black folding chair facing frat house
gas leak? pervasive petrichor again
ROAD CLOSED sign that lies

instead of always wandering around looking for

the sound behind the sound
the taste behind the taste
the touch under the touch
the sight beyond the vision
the smell beyond the scent
the glow beyond the hill
the face beyond the crescent
the bend beyond the break

Roused out of my swoon
hollow & absent
how could I fight?

I had been carrying
something that looks like a knot
in the wood

It was not a knot
in the wood   It was a thought
but wasn’t no good

Fresh lettuce & oxygenated air
have skinned me terribly    A sunset leans 
exactly in the opposite direction

If I were a moviemaker
I’d set about hunting for 
a bouquet of daisies in the waiting room

*Bibliomanced from random phrases of Julio Cortázar’s A Certain Lucas + one pronoun change (her to my).

Join the microfiber cleaning club? Spic and/or Span a Venn Diagram? Playing the long game of compulsory sports just
to avoid dust-busting the futon is okay if we’re all poets, ‘cause the hard work of poeting is its own taut glowing
turtle mapping zone of fealty to discouragement.

Continuing to misspell “vigilance” = putting down the porn? If so, from now on I’ll need to rent my B&D equipment
from that 99 cent place in Hatley (home of Polish Narnia’s talking military coyotes). After a road trip like that, what
wouldn’t I give for some fast cheap reiki on Zoom?

Five things I would give: 1.) that cucumber-cheddar-Triscuits-mustard snack you invented; 2.) the wet garlicky
flatbread in the “discontinued” aisle by the birdseed; 3.) Henry Ford’s curtain hack; 4.) “Cap’n Crunch’s” “cock”;
5.) perfume that smells like weeping.

Are we still stalking the womb of you know whom? Or celebrating the parallel spectacles of fascism in Nazi Germany
and present-day America? Either way, I think I’ve stopped experiencing the contradictions of the swamp master
of the microfiber cleaning club, which I haven’t joined yet because of that weird loud Polish talking coyote

rustling in the underbrush. 

our pink and chocolate field

mushroom of a boyfriend 

saw the bear crossing 

plainfield    bluebells too 

long underwater to un 

scraggle    my lobes still

practically floating

I have stopped experiencing

the contract of days 

the cosmos this season 

chest finely threaded 

the wasp having

already   I’ll keep fingering

the ferns still 

in their paper  wobble 

my legs enough

to activate wilderness

why is this particular 

headwater so much

more iridescent? whatever

we mounted was in dreams–

where is the swamp master

of this unincorporated 

village? right where I left

them, sluice

in hand–

Devotion I should dig. I do. But how I
dread dreaming, departing as it does
from the dregs of the day. I digress. Or
I demur (directing myself to wall). Door-
ways are dreamy, no? Docents. I have
developed a disposition. Drawn to
drawings of dancers, the dangers of
darkness, I decide dharma is not duty.
Data does not drive me. Dynamite does.
I divine what is divine without deriving
design. I am a doubter who has willed
herself to dare. Delve. I dig. Ditches and
wells. I do this all day. I do this well. Each
depthcharge delightful as a doe dappled
by dew. A damp doe at dawn, dotted and
doting, before her daughter darts suddenly
away as doe is done–as doe dies and is
dragged into the middle distance. This
God does. Beyond all adoration there is
dismay, the undoing of May. The dis-
possessed despise what a god deigns
to destroy yet still demands amidst
debris: a tendering. I dig and dig and
never discover my demons, only pan-
demonium. Dented bowls, buried dolls
and dormant beetles–droll and devious
–ready to devour what is dearest, to de-
compose this diorama, to end the un
endurable, disperse dust. We drudges
we drones we diggers–it is not doom
we idolize. Doom, we decipher.