Everything is just like everything else only on a different scale. Galaxies spin like atoms, sure, but also the country has this cloud of negative   electricity around it…

  Rosie, who’s dying of malabsorption, yaps on the front porch. A walking ossuary, she treads the matchboards and waits for the Witnesses—two young women who must smell faintly, I…

  Headlight-brightened bodies pass by, briefly, before blackening again in the nameless expanse of gulch & grass. One could almost say   illusion, that all this seeing is a trick…

  I am listening    by which I mean humming over      by which I mean talking over a bit less than usual       to one of those songs I’m told     have molded…

  What happens when no one who could hold a pen saw your great- aunt as human: records and recordings pinprick your neck’s back— Before they called us stupid coolies,…

  You see only an impression in dug earth, long settled into dent on the forested floor: an unmarked grave where a corpse sinks. Moss- covered granite fieldstones in electric…

  Cloudy, primal green floods the canvas, superimposed with a scarlet maple and sepia poplar leaf upright as rooted trunks. A trinity—three seasons— death closest.   Stages of cancer—yours IV…

  —from The Warhol Letters   I’ve become obsessed with bears & I hear you laughing at me through a veil   of Fire Island sweat & zinc oxide. Summer…

  There’s nothing here to see. Relax. Beside a Coke machine, a guy who acts As if he’s in a movie Puffs on a Marlboro Light. It’s moody; Nothing’s happening…

  The city turns perfume shop. I can’t think at all with the jasmine so thick. Angels circle me like sharks, waiting for sweat or tears, anything wet and bodily.…

  On the brink of our extinction, the milk in the fridge had not yet spoiled. We ate olives with our fingers, swallowed cold beer, thought little of our health.…

  I just can’t remember the saint whose name I took at my ‘04 Confirmation. Last year one friend took Hildegard. She’s a library scientist. This year another took Dymphna.…