Zendaya just found Jesus’s tomb but Fergie is “missing,”
according to Middle Distance Drip State Connection,
the popular Popular Mechanics TV celebrity news show,
which operates as an extension of the celebrity website,
These Damn Rotten Kids — Always with the Problems!
I’m now watching Cher reviewing Sarah Jessica Parker’s
Adele’s Kingdom Hall Chicken Soup, a roman à clef
featuring hungry elders on boats, mysterious spores,
mandatory, structured public ministry, and a line of ants
of non-Earthly origin who drown after climbing the bowl,
told in second person from the point of view of the bowl.
“I wasn’t expecting the book to end with Zach Galifianakis,
 son of a heating oil vendor, crashing a plane into Venus,”
says Cher, “but I love how the bowl can’t say his name.
Neither can I, honestly, but that’s because I’m just lazy.”
Me, I learned the importance of saying names correctly
early on, as a member of a meat counter underclass.
It was forbidden to mix red and green peppers, but okay
to tie a bandana around a side of beef and call it a boy.
So check your privilege, Cher. Go out and find Fergie.

I tell Ginger I am seeking retribution for all wrong narratives about us. Leisurely,
a drip-state. This is conviction. This is adult time, this is not Montessori.
The invitation is in the mail: you are invited, and you are invited, and you are invited.
Make no mistake, there is an anti-guest list, and maybe you are on it.
Not you, of course, but the wrongdoing. Denial at the door, at the pew,
at the threshold, in the choir, someone on the street singing an old hymn
low and slow, someone mumbling an incantation on a train, someone
on their knees giving eye contact, brush the hair off their cheek.
This morning I held a crystal glass up to the light and rainbows refracted
throughout the room, the first color in my life in days. Where is God
right now? I plead for the interruption, the intercession, on my knees
looking up. Or with narrowed eyes into middle distance, so many tricks.
Either way, I lie in wait, for as long as it takes, everyone should stay alert.

Birds chirping     I feel like that doesn’t happen   Oh wait      They are always      in that tree

How is it already       Early evening       Thin branches  fat green leaves    People below on the street

Demur laughter    Photographer     Someone in a wedding dress   Staged laughter

Fading sun  That light    Magic hour some say

Growing up  I had a best friend      Always said      When I get married     He was the most girl-crazy 

boy I’d ever known      I never       Thought about       marriage          My parents 

Sure they laughed     Some of the time      They also argued   Shouted and were always  worried

About money     Giving money     away to the Kingdom Hall     When they didn’t even have money 

To give away like that    Argued about       Robin and me    Always     problems

With kids      Marriage wasn’t something        I aspired to     My best friend would say   When I get

married I’m going to      have a house on a lake      with boat    Not sure     if that ever happened 

Truth was always there       But finally he saw it      I would never      love God    Like him   

I had a different idea      of worship     He stopped        talking to me   I never had dreams

of owning houses   or boats   Said I’d  be playing bass    Be in a band     Not that I could play bass     

His mom used to make     Spaghetti with butter     for dinner   Sprinkle parmesan cheese 

from        the container     Sometimes I’d lie     Say I could only come over    After dinner   

Not that my mother      was Martha Stewart      Or, anything    Jared sends      me a recipe 

“Hillary Duff’s Cilantro Chicken Soup”     He’ll write a novel   Plotless    Hungry characters  Chicken soup

I’ll write a poem   Fame    Missing ingredients    Life from the bowl’s perspective

Our laughter     meets in the middle of an ocean People can be far away    but not feel that far away

I planted seeds today to make up for yesterday’s excess, and just

as I’m about to write this poem Desmond wants to show me a Minecraft

parody of Peppa Pig. Then I discover a line of ants. Envy and mistrust

at work impede my sanity. My team is both under and over-staffed,

and I am overwhelmed, intermittently trying to hard and not trying

enough. The ants have discovered a piece of cheese. I do care what 

my coworkers think, and I need a salary, there’s no denying it. The higher

the better. I don’t know the names of the yellow flowers and glare

at my boss without meaning to. I’m just trying to survive the astrology

of the week, month, year. What are you implying? That survival 

isn’t a goal–but that’s what every holiday is about, every cosmology

is the story of someone or some group eking it out by not dying

year after year and then leaving some kind of archival evidence

that proves their existence. I’m having trouble not feeling bitter 

this afternoon, the senseless emphasis of annual performance reviews

and self-evaluation. What is any good? I pick up the random litter

from our yard and wonder who thinks it’s ok to throw their McDonald’s

wrapper on my rosemary. I mean what does it mean to be good at

something? I am ok at gardening. My approach is to keep doing it

and slowly improve. I tried to write romance novels once, was not

good at it. I am a good enough parent, but I don’t know what kind of bird

is calling outside the kitchen window and I want to be admired for being

myself, which is ridiculous and not ridiculous. I have tried being myself

at work and also hiding as much of myself as possible. Neither is effective.

The blurred non-divide between life and work and the freeing realization

that everything is everything. I used to live in a house with several mantelshelves

and so several fireplaces, all decorated with pictures, mostly. Damnation

is a kind of distinction, I think, drinking my coffee as coffee-in-itself,

or imagining I do. Coco leans into me, sees her name and says, ‘What

are you writing?” And I say, “If you’re going to be all up in my business

you’ll definitely be in the poem.” She touches my earrings, my cheek,

makes baby babble. Desmond yells about not having screentime,

then informs me that I’m distracting myself from writing, then tells

me my hair looks crazy, then laughs and says, “Birds are so funny,

they flock. Flocking birds!” At this point I’m wondering about the parallels

between writing a poem and trying to leave the house on a crummy

Tuesday morning. “Flocking birds these days,” says Desmond, then runs 

into the living room while I grouse about feeling hot and try to have a thought.

Google Gemini says I should say, “I am trying to learn how to be in the world

without being of it,” but that’s not true. We’re all of this world while being 

in it. I’m not on it, though, not this morning, awaiting my annual performance

review, explaining that a lowercase d and an uppercase do go in opposite 

directions, wondering how to quantify the way I’ve spent most of my time

for the approximate past twelve months, wondering what the requirements

exceeding expectations are. “Pretend I’m a grumpy monkey,” Desmond says,

and that’s what I am, a grumpy, slightly panicked creature who can’t shake it off, 

who gets excited when the back brick steps get power washed, tells the children 

to come see, thinks about the relationship between power washing and heartache.

scraping the bottom     of a bunch of barrels

     I ask the sky     to paint me a poem

orange sherbet     cloud stripes     against blue 

     where there was no texture     or edge

bat floundering low     then gone     

                    “Broken wing?”

Venus visible so soon after     sun gone     

     diamond glint     on pastel pink     

“I wish the bat would come back” 

               (squeaking) 

“Did you hear that?” 

               (laughing) “Yes”

(trying again) “I wish the bat would come back”

               (silence)

“It’s not working” 
               
               (beat) 

                         “That’s a vulture”

          contrail headed straight     for diamond

     plane hits Venus     tears run down     

Septimus’s cheeks     for all this beauty     

     comes merely     from looking     

cables taut or saggy

     against gradient     west to east

     pink     orange     blue

“it’s changing so fast” 

     “I just saw your friend fly

                         over the rooftops”

Seven Dollars & Eighty-Eight Cents

It’s raining
gray & dismal
numbers, the field
quivering in the runnels
along the windowpanes

It’s April near tax day & raining
numbers detached from time,
a list of last year & the trips
I don’t remember taking,
displacement being general

Eight days, eleven days,
twenty two days, forty seven
days, no journey under a couple
thousand in airfare & nothing
that moved the needle

from your arm, knit
a frayed bone, healed a worn
pattern, softened any referral of pain
or relieved the skipping gouge
in our circular groove of history

Yeah, they’re playing our song, again

& we found ourselves swaying
& shoved by circumstance
& terminology into a corner
until we coalesced
after decades of trying

into a flint-chipped
point of
no

A karaoke pick often depends
On how the date is going

Choose your fighter: “Bizarre
Love Triangle” or “Shoop”

“Gimme More” or “Criminal”
Not enough Coors Light in the world

To drown the counterproductive doctrines
Adopted by inexplicably lonely girls

But friends, the rumors are true:
Confidence can be relearned

When you excise men to the point
They’re novel & invest in singing lessons

From a maestro in a magenta car seat
One unhinged note at a time

and not least of which was that I *had* a body.
Before puberty I don’t remember much, far from fully,
but earlier in childhood it felt as if—as Merleau-Ponty
once lied—I *was* my body. What I mean is I felt no
meaningful division between us. Certainly, as a girl
I had early on learned to control large swathes of
my physical expression, to keep any gregariousness
or unruliness invisible, but this was a coordination,
a hide-and-seek with my forces working in absolute
concert to achieve discreet unknowable ends expected
of me by parents, teachers, the heavy sense of decorum
filtering in through the cigarette-stained sheers of
our front-room bay along with breeze and traffic-sound
I pretended ocean as I lay day-after-day in a thick
torpor. I’d no idea such exhaustion came from the game
of self-abnegation itself. Becoming imperceptible in-
side one’s own body was just how a girl was meant to
exist, so I tried. Other latchkey children, I have since
been told, watched hours of afternoon TV when home
alone, and this produced in them a sluggish state
that presented similarly to, but was not, my own. Un-
like me, they allowed ocular entrance to all animated
perversion and dopamine trigger. The onslaught of
rancid, florid media slowed the parts of their minds so
exquisitely primed at that age to make and do. But
that was not me ~ I learned ~ although I was later able to
mimic, I could never inhabit the core of other children.

In Eugene    At the organic supermarket     Only job open       was the meat counter

Next day they interview      My roommate    for a cashier position       Store opens     Amanda

All other cashiers    attractive college girls      I see       what’s going on here    I didn’t 

even eat meat    I needed       a job   I’d have to       put sausage stuff      in the intestine casings 

Sometimes       I’d do         a bad job     Too much meat     The casing would rip    Start over    At home 

even after       shower        The smell of        dead flesh       on fingers       Even       after shower    

Elizabeth smelled like apples carrots       Smelled like fruit        From the juicing plant

Genesis juice          A Eugene institution      Grateful Dead on      the speakers    Elizabeth 

in her       knee-high rubbers       I quit       the meat counter        By that time I 

was mostly     Making marinades    gallon buckets of marinades    John didn’t want      me to leave

After we locked the doors      John, Justin and I        Would drink beers

Waste away        into the small hours      After I quit   Amanda let me use     Her employee discount   

Sometimes Justin let me       use his employee discount      Years later     Justin and Amanda 

would date       This was Portland         We all lived together       Justin was in a band    Justin’s friend

would stay with us      A dealer from Alaska       Trashcans filled with      mushrooms   weed   

Sheets of acid           Sometimes opium   We had a roommate meeting    Felt  uncomfortable  

Said Fuck it        To be young       To take so many risks     Feeling reckless

He got caught       Felt     bad about that    We’d all gone our separate ways       A forgotten time

I’m losing     the thread   in Eugene I left     the meat counter   Worked at record store 

No one really      used my employee discount   I used the hell out of it    I was always broke 

books beer records CDs too      A gnat annoying me   Right between the eyes   Hitomi 

in the kitchen   pork sizzing      in the pan   Emma rubbing       her stomach   

Exaggerated motions    True hunger      When’s the last time      you had animal flesh    In your mouth

Maybe 18 maybe 20     Does fish count        An unwritten novel on     Unfortunate compromises