No need for an appointment, crisis will erupt without you, another loud melancholy.   Stop picking your skin, pulling hair. Your mother would say stop that   you’ll leave…

  Your mother tells me how her own mother always talked when she did jigsaw puzzles,   pushing the pieces in and muttering “I’ll make you fit” under her breath.…

  everyone i lived with is either dead or has since been reborn. on the cape sober houses flank summer homes. august women reek of moisture and diamonds. i know…

  God it’s cold but not so cold that I would rather be asleep. I just want a little quiet and a lot of money, hallelujah. Now I am a…

  How we love: by taking another name into our mouth and swallowing it   for safekeeping. By softening at a touch the way dusk dissolves the city,   bodies…

  You know the story He became the rain Then a roaring fire Face impassive Flames licking warm & thick & ferocious The furl of his shirt in hot air…

  is a convenience: we say fish don’t feel it. catch   a trout by its lip & leave a hook there, boil   a lobster alive & think steam,…

  two crows have landed on the roof of the applebee’s, so it must be   halloween. for crows are the spookiest bird & applebee’s is the spookiest place  …

  I used to have this job that was just an angle.   What was required of me was to not be toward it, not tilt my body in a…

  Having deep-cleaned the home of the reigning brand ambassador for a haute line of children’s books, I’d had enough of all those stories. Kids spinning back through history to…

  from Nora right before I left for work at Apollo, our college town’s carpet cleaning service. Twelve-hour days in the Midwest drought summer of 1988, sucking up dirt from…

  —for Joey   Who knew we’d scramble out the rip of the ocean of home?   Your flailing limbs proving first is the worst. Who knew we’d subsist  …