Larkin said: “I know this is paradise,” picturing those fuck-drunk teens who brushed past him on the cobbled street: the boy’s hand on her hip, beer on his breath;…

  Meditate: though you balk at stalk, my tassels tantalize, manchild majazzling, intricate florals radiate out from the central sunflower, butterflies dally, dance, bees prance, bumble, dizzy, bop-pop out like…

  If you hold the syringe sideways, is it more gangster? You push the plunger through the barrel. The hilt of the blade hubs the needle, holds the shaft’s darkness…

  I feel like I am forgetting something every time I travel. Outside baggage, four excavators paw at the wreckage of the old terminal like the horses whose barn burns…

  From his schoolbook, the boy tore out a map of seas. The teacher with her sunny face and scraped-back hair wasn’t looking. The blues were beautiful. He’d never seen…

  the stew sauce sizzles little hope & joy accumulates we are made of what we forgive i go out for care, gaze & liquor i am the sky &…

  To a world spun around one question. To the geometries of the radio bird on brown brambles in winter— to our kitchen doors & dens of disorder. To the…

Your mother wanted to give you an origin story of which to be proud, not the embarrassment of finding out she was pregnant while working the land records of the…

A thunderclap, and the sparrows erupt from the clouds like a shock of rain. I awake to such closeness. My youth, the bird struggling in my chest with all its…

  We wake in the dark. The night, wide as a horse’s maw, yawns. I want to be as silent as the trees before shaking leaves from their sides. It…

  my body sheds new life, over & double. i was told both it was sacred, it was filth— in other words godliness i do not care for. my folklore…

  Awake in bed I listened to my father tune up the guitar, the big, black songbook opened to any one of his dozens of favorite songs—Shortenin’ Bread, Hard Travellin’,…