“AIDS obliges people to think of sex as having, possibly, the direst consequences: suicide. Or murder.”—Susan Sontag   The summer I danced to Donna Summer’s endless I Feel Love, ecstatic,…

  When I first take my rescue dog to the vet he gives her a treat   and she holds it gently in her mouth for the entire appointment.  …

  My therapist tells me that the stomach holds most of our feelings. She doesn’t mean what goes into it, but still I start to dream up a feast of…

  Here I am, the heavy bird, shifting high above, invisible at night, feathered black, as much a pit as any necrotic tooth in any unkempt mouth, crook-necked, scythe-headed, eyes…

  Please remember me as misunderstood, a butcher by circumstance, untrusted, but then proven when I turn back to the burning village, pull the missing child or injured brother from…

  Undead, undead, undead, undead, undead, undead —Bauhaus   When I say I like your earrings, it comes out sounding as though they sing to me like a dinner bell…

  In the shadows of the underwater world sound muffles. Strokes stretch your body over the taut skin of water, the mouth of the earth, the place where there is…

  On the night we visited your favorite restaurant, the sea churned outside the salt-crusted window. We couldn’t see you anymore, but we felt your small ghost lean over our…

  The world is trying to kill me one news story, one sneeze, one bad president at a time. And maybe I don’t care anymore if I’m dead. That’s what…

  Every time I hear a gunshot I feel it in the back of my teeth as a shiver,   a silver ache. Maybe it’s from the many years of…

  after “View of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer” by Vincent Van Gogh, 1888   White wash, black thatch, tiles of tangerine, marigold, ginger—saffron cathedral, and this patch before us—greens, blues, purples, a woman…

  gone through the back door late to let out the dogs I would not have found the ten-point buck pilfering the bird feeder, stunned as I with his hungry…