Month: April 2026

Before it’s all gone
And I’m left behind

Fat with blood
Toasting my success

-ful friends
I want to enjoy

An exhibitionist streak
Before I lose my nerve

Bloated on a crest
Of my own allure

To dole out kisses
Amongst bouncing pretties

Just outside the coatroom
Of a club I’ll never see again

I am waiting for a representative from the moving company to arrive

and give me a moving estimate and they are late, late. The sun through

the window and my thriving plants. I have not looked at the news, 

alive as I am, sullen as I am, staring at bestrewn hay on someone’s

lawn as I drive by,  wondering dully if I should similarly re-seed and bestrew 

hay upon the grass in our front yard. A pardoned Capitol rioter who live-

streamed himself touching women’s hair on the metro last month was arrested

again. I’m preparing for a breakthrough; I contrive an idea that I might

find something new in the archive of dry flowers in my studio. “I’ve noticed

something weird,” says Coco. “Do birds eat grass?” I start to say something

about what starlings eat but lack information. I can’t stay focused today, 

keep thinking about Iran and Lebanon, keep humming songs from K-Pop

Demon Hunters and checking my email. I want news but not the actual

news. Want someone to tell me they’re giving me money or publishing

a poem. I’m ready to be tractable today. Convince me. Is this a madrigal?

No, it’s already too long, but I long for poetic polyphony, something uplifting

but real. In one week, I’ll be in New Orleans at a conference, and I’m already

anxious about leaving my family and anxious about who I’ll see. I canvass

my friends, ask if I should be worried. I know the answer is no. My unsteady

mood is not ready for this clarity, cannot read a compass, cannot unamass

enough nervous energy to just push on through. To what, anyway. What would

an oneiromancer say about last night’s dream where I married my highschool

boyfriend? This is a new dream development. In adulthood, my dreams return

to former lovers more often than anything else. I found a hawktail feather in my

drawer, feathers are made of a central shaft with branching fibers called barbs,

and each barb has even smaller branches called barbules. The barbules of

dreams are the associative ideas based on the few things you remember.

I remember in dreams that people are not themselves, they are often marvels,

messengers, obstacles and cerebral reminders of what has passed and what

is to come, if we can be reminded about the future. What are the chances

that the signification of certain people and objects detaches from them to

become a melange of significations? What are the circumstances of this

detachment? I have loved a lot of people, so don’t intimate that I’m stingy. 

I’ve probably loved you, engaged in at least minor flirtation. And why not?

The grimy, un-empty echos of love bring me closer to some solution. The clingy

vestiges of romance are not for me, and in this fashion I formate a kind of

burning patience, the patience of fire on a slow burn, the patience of 

bad romance, which is the patience of romance, the patience of conversation,

of hesitating revelation. We don’t need to know everything all at once,

statements of falsity are as likely as statements of fact. A starling eats 

whatever it wants. In spring and summer they eat invertebrates, their favorites. 

So truth and error interlace. Late, late, I wait for the call that does not come,

I do not read the news, but news arrives. I cannot compass this turning, this

weather of nerves, this half-articulated conversation. A starling sings again.

Jupiter at rest

There was candlewax in my hair for seven days and seven nights the clouds were old testament we watched the sky which plane would fall first which soldier would fall first which angel would descend shocked by a neutral wire you might be shocked at how many people are already dead inside which astronaut will touch ground first which child will fall first small and crumpled my mouth and hands inside this numb poem words didn’t disappear me they boiled away inside 

erotic as air

stickily removing itself

from a balloon

the vernal body stays

in bed watching

massasauga rattlesnake

outtakes

that’s it

that’s the commitment

complete transparency

with the dirt lot magnolia

complete transparency

with the river red bud only our dead

friend can actually 

name safe 

word    skin

sensation    no 

language    face 

plant 

heirloom      fuckweed

probably sounds prettier

PROBABLY SOUNDS PRETTIER

where you come from

what can the radio

reasonably broadcast

not the river giving 

sleep paralysis      reevaluating 

safe play structures naturalizing 

literal kittens      doing

a deep dive 

into your bird

of the day

tender tooth and tongue

coming in between stations 

in this episode of floodcast

snowmelt overflows my final hoof print

the martin maintains a deep alien

shade, no direct address

necessary when speaking 

with hepatica and bloodroot      we discover

we’re our own demon lovers 

hot pink hair shirts hiss and giggle

    

A place to get unfound             decentered no middle            how to thread

These orange socks   Pluck    the rosemary   Chop    the rosemary         Fingers taste 

like green herbs    Books spilt all over the table       No clean forks          to be found,

the faded silver      dulling tips       Bought years ago         in Brooklyn 

A corner restaurant suddenly                                        going out of business,

How many potatoes      will there be guests?             Do we need wine? 

Oh, sober again?        Losing light        pull the curtains         Kids on the street shouting

Can you hold this?   Sharp    cheddar against the grater     Swamp-green kale ripped    from stem

I used to know a girl       Who would eat bell peppers like apples     I was in an undergrad

This was Portland      we had a poetry class together     we worked at a bookstore  mostly untogether

Rarely did our       shifts overlap     Our classmates said         she was just being eccentric I

didn’t bother      to care but       as I cut       yellow and red bell peppers I  

see her   biting into one   I think we were walking     to a W.S. Merwin reading   

what was her name?  I think I had a girlfriend        but was lonely          I think I

was worrying about making       rent       paying       car insurance    

Sundown might be
a showdown if you
can believe the shitposting

Sundown is gold
a little pink
some scraggly blue

hung on the tip of the hill
among some forward-
thinking scraps

of cloud here
in the concrete world
where Artemis lovingly

hovers in the glow
of the moon
Aloud I can’t say it

but inside we’re all
hollering it: Shut
up & sit down & just

go away forever
You drain slime
You dog-unworthy waste

You sociopathic dunce
in the corner
of every one of our brains

I WANT THE LAST DECADE OF MY LIFE BACK
I consider screaming at the child pirouetting

Across the grassy field on her way home
Where are you going in your tutu? Nowhere

All the role models stepped on landmines and
There’s no Bluey episode about nuclear winter

So who will guide us through the cornflowers
Compare us to the hellebores, too ashamed

To show our damned faces in the sunlight
Doing the drugs only led to septum issues

Reading the room only led to gastroenteritis
From hell’s heart I Slack at thee

Delete the last dregs of braggadocio
Fucking make it all up as I go

What are the relational metaphysics of Tuesday compared to Monday?

Compared to the oppressive goals of an old essentialism? I cannot truly

know the essence of Tuesday or any other day, not through study

or precisely-wrought out regimens. The work week is cruelly made,

no doubt. Desmond calls it unfair. If reality exists as a surplus

even beyond the causal interactions of dust and raindrops,

then I will continue to wish for more sleep, regardless of how much

sleep I actually get, for sleep is never fully expressed. The cyclopes

were of three groups, according to ancient mythographers. Some were

Gods, some were shepherds, and some were wall-builders. This is

not an appeal to a sound, table-thumping materialism and I don’t not

concur with the mythographers. Once we speak of objects–of cyclopes–

in terms of surprise and opacity, we cannot reduce them to their actions

and relations any more than to their ultimate pieces. The atoms of

a cyclops are just as real as a cyclops, and the hours and minutes

as real as the days. I feel bent, I mean refracted, by the transition

from day to day, but there’s no hidden essential core to me or my

atoms, or to any mythological creature that might or might not

come along. I’d like to be a shepherd on an island, at least occasionally.

There is existential potential in being an isolated, monstrous

tender of sheep. No hidden materiality, just the simultaneous 

participation in all of the modes other than the one we happen 

to be considering at any given moment. The spontaneous appearance

of dumplings and the flattening of attention, the achromatin

un-coloring, maybe undistinguishing, continuum of experience. 

I have wanted to go to Iran my entire life, to eat the same food

that nourished me in my mother’s womb, see the birthplace

of the founder of a religion I no longer subscribe to but still think

of with fondness. Is it possible to be fond of a religion one has

rejected? No one has direct access to political truth, there is 

no unpopular thing-in-itself, as such. I can make a poem without

knowing what the poem is about. I’m better with sentences,

but knowing the content of a sentence is a tenuous endeavor,

too. The sentence is made of words. The sentence expresses

an idea. When Trump tweets that “a whole civilization will die

tonight,” he threatens genocide. What redress is there for such

a statement, as if a sentence is not both its words and its action.

There’s an obvious and permanent difference between a thing and 

knowledge of it. I expected to feel overwhelmed by parenting

without knowing what being overwhelmed would be like. Knowledge

of the Easter egg is not the egg. “It’s not even Easter,” Coco said

when they looked for eggs on Monday after school. “Yes,” I say,

“but yesterday was too rainy for the Easter Bunny.” In the house,

the light from all the lamps and windows unites into the light,

but each light source and its light are distinct, too. The undifferentiated

light and the undivided brightness. But what do we do about shadows,

which are also a part of the light in the house? If anything brings together

the poets and the philosophers, it is the claim to a non-knowledge

that is nonetheless not just negative. It’s not all or nothing.

(with lines from yous)

Your zebra bicep is not worth the dopplering,
imaginary blood soup stud.
But I’m dying to know: what does it take
to be a dating columnist?
Copious meatloaf?
A lot of neuroscience conferences?
Praying you have enough blue velvet bandwidth
to find lime time soothing?
When it’s quiet I think of you whining.
That’s my mic drop.
‘Cause in Skinofmyteethville, noise verbs hard.
I wrote this on my phone and emailed it to myself
while running around screaming “Burn it all down!”
I know — I effed it up further.

Tomorrow, I’ll do better.