Poetry

She dreamt of her days lived, they were that sweet. In the morning there were omelets stuffed with goat cheese, and in the afternoon, espresso in the park, the one with the pond and long-necked swans that coasted along the water’s glass skin; there were movie theaters and bars and just when Eve thought there …

because you still grind yourselves into glass / powder just to wake me each morning. You grew into spoiled wet dreams who knew / my mother was dying before she did / her monthly strippingfor doctors; your quiet voice / the steady pang of my dull incisor. The texture of her pinto beans dissolved / …

Sapello sky      open as a first breath               filled pink with tomorrow’s weather                           mismatched fenceposts              splintering into Ys       those warped bodies    embalmed with winter                      the wind moves in                  summer skeletons of alfalfa turned tumble    -weed patches and pine branchesrecite mariachi             music whistled            by ancestors shuffling playing cards                    around a home                      -made graveyard in the field                      …

Had you lived longer, perhaps you might remember, or pretend to remember, holding my hand at that funeral on the last dayI’d see you alive, the two of us meeting in that crowded vestibuleby chance after so many years, both of us looking for spaceon the coatracks, finding none, leaving our coats on, a topcoat …

I give you a man in a waiting room, waiting, a man so plain, so very ordinary—gray, brown and brown, a little blue—that were he not alone he’d be invisible.We can see him this clearly because there’s no one else here. He’s seated in one of the too many identical chairs—chrome frame, green vinyl upholstery. …

with language from a Daily Mail articleIceland, 2012: “When the details of the missing person were issued, the woman . . . unwittingly joined the search party for herself. After a night-long operation involving around 50 people, the ‘missing woman’ eventually realized she was the source of the search and informed police.” The police chief …

I want a lover who will bring me small useless things. A keychain from Roswell. A lollipop with a scorpion in it. A magnet in the shape of a state. It turns out—I can forgive almost anything, so far. I think of words that sound the same but mean different things. Refuse (refuse), lie (lie), …

I’m turning into the parking lot of my doctor’s office and listening to Richard Pryor tell an interviewerthat when they rehearsed the flying scenes in that Superman movie, he and costar Christopher Reeve were suspended from wires in a studio with walls and a ceiling and mats on the floor, but for the actual shot,they …

so there I was cruising the trails lookingat the other men looking at me & when there wereno men to look at I was looking at Grindr as the leaves fell around me & the menpassed other men until they again passed me& each time a man passed I rearranged myselfin my shorts even when …