jealous tourists burn to enter her narrow heart or hole / men dressed as men are genius own / the daylight on their face

The rain drops from the sky, sonorous, pushing // bullet-shape impressions into the sand, he scrambles up the face of the dune.

I am thinking over everything I thought / I believed. Its small particles, / its vast rooms of exquisite but broken pieces.

her war so that we / could grieve easy / and decontextualized, the injury soft

I saw / him in the same way I saw the museum. Displayed inside glass: / a man who lived to be dead. For five / thousand years snow was / gentlesweet, preserving him as skin & tufts once-was-hair.

The wall held the drips, where silence stood, / where she's going. Pray for rain / if you go.

I did not want to / go / we followed / a mile / finally we arrived / to see

when Missouri prisms up the glass / like the clear pink yes of Sunday morning: / I’ll exit.

A spider the size of a baseball, just in time for opening day, more or less as poisonous as the mine’s boarded-up air.

Longing to go home, we balance freedoms in still-soft palms, swaddle guns like babies, and carry them close to our chests as we march in the bone-splitting cold. Heading straight as the crow, we invite history to circle round.

outline of a head or of a seated figure with a child / is covering what it opens around. Here, someone said, / please take this.

The author’s hand in the scene. // Another metaphor for faith // foreshadowed in the decision // to insure or not insure in case // it will burn. It isn’t a nice house // but a university of suffering.

Some days I relax / in the most beautiful zone and hope / to be struck down, to be disappeared / by an unexpected special attack, but erasure / can't be summoned so easily.

You think // we must be going crazy as a people. / To wash off all this blood, whose hues // we cannot name but near pastel, falsetto, / there, our own two hands.

as our pure stone gains a weak door / as this weak servant alters this lesser frame / as a double frame gains this wounded roof / as this lesser roof counts thy mighty frame

pick up an orange and press // the skin, feeling for strings where they // shouldn’t be. Open the door // Some ancient instrument // washes your floor.

Your arm is around his torso. Your torsos are against a tree. Pan circles this question in a book he’s reading about emotional disease. You sit on a volcano. Beneath you is a village, behind that a sunset. He crushes clover in his fist like a jaw eats a salad.

explosives / strapped to a bridge, / a poorly / trained militia, / a palace / stripped to the level / of jail, / the Euphrates’ / leisurely descent / to desert.

Peek / in the cupboard, they’re / huddled in situ: a small herd / of grins. It’s almost enough / to make me forget / the history of my desire.

You won’t look. You just hold your breath at the end of the driveway, complain about the heat. The coyotes pick at our garbage bins every night. I hear their paws on the asphalt, their breath at the threshold.

stormwater sags the walls as the ghost spin blossoms berries of ro in her daughter's daughter's brains the girl doublebled shares a heart with the pines

the tide is out / like mine / I build a sand castle / I learn from the muscles / I drip dry / I write about the ocean / and when I am faced by it / I am a humble animal / this untamed body / I have come from

There are dreams here / that I forgot to mention. // The same dreams I’ve had / before. The slow crank // of a wind-up toy, pretty / little thing. A mother calls // her son from a distance. / A marble is dropped // in a porcelain sink.

Loot that holds / at the bottom of conversation. / “How do you ail?” I say. / I store old photos in a public place. / I speak an old style I got from / a book. Once it was given to me twice. / I don’t feel until you’ve started / speaking, how do you do? / Don’t ask, but answer.

Everything does weep, but oh / how it growls, when the wailing is done. / If anger, on the other side of fear, / is rage, this city was delivered to / death, with savage conviction.

the sex there's space for something like / forgiveness maybe like with that fifty so / mething man those nights were my way of / shitting out the shame in my life even if

If I have to bathe this man that i loathe. / Bathe him, who has hurt my child, gently, and then give him / small sips from a glass of milk, comb his wet hair down... and all / the while the sounds of her screaming are broadcast through the / bathroom.

With machete in hand, hack open the belly / of a pregnant cow. With placenta shriveled, / you crawl inside. It’s winter. There is no more light.

Feathery fumes / flapping / like church bells / summoning the faithful / and unfaithful / to worship, / to war, / towing their ships / towards shores / they'll never reach, shores already discovered.

Do you remember the big knob we’d unspool across the dial, / the eye to its glass toothy grin as if / there was another world outside of this one and if you could find someone / there you could touch it,

where you thought / the sun would be // the sun ought to be / shooting its solar flare / into the shiniest part // of your hummingbird heart / heart quaking

When Netscape took over the landscape, we had to remind ourselves about the cure for seasickness. Look up and out as your screen turns into old-fashioned glass, invaded by white clouds and rainbow panoramas. When the mesmeric smears of open sea and wind get squeezed into the palm of your hand, the ship divides the sea. Cold is a current of thought where nothing seems to circulate.

so in demand by strangers / you might say my name cursed me / to solitude. I don't see any prophets around, / do you? If so, pass out my number / tell him I said what's up // where have you been all my life

Freedom, or fission. Or both, of course. Of course, of course, of course. It varies, to some degree. Distributions arise. How to part with this; parry that. How to calculate the number of dimensions in this domain. You say variance and I say divergent. And then we say nothing at all.

Sand divines my desiccation. So too with culture, words I use to speak my distance from the desert. Culture too resides in me an intercourse most internal.

Eventually his smile starts to look like Golgotha / U feel urself choking on his shadow / Something (how can it be) both soft and sharp / He keeps saying “we’re already in communism, look harder” // Avoiding death is / losing the game of exile

in passing some / all thresh and bark / to be sure / they are // in the / mundane // concrete / brutalist

The keys are built into the sky / And a boat at every center / Red drops from the ceiling like / a night coming on and closing / and the sky it drops this way / to open. heaps of keys inside

To resist the world is to admit that there is an unbreaking / absence at the heart of life. Here, I have tried to find a way to / surround it, to put a roof over it. To extend the eaves in a line / that mirrors the earth’s own horizon, that brings some sense of / scale to the infinite.

On Wednesday, the dust of their arguing threatens to choke them. They rush to open every window, turn on the ceiling fans. It all starts when she puts his desk inside the bathroom. He looks ridiculous when he sits on the toilet. The toilet is much too short to be a functioning chair.

The circumference of recovery descends around your belly like an inflatable tube in the Hudson. The room returns to the sun from your lap as I wait for you to surface at home. Our non-negotiables are hardwood floors and strong family values. I swap my head for your tongue and your storge for my optimistic forecast: our future is clear blue ultra and the furthest thing away from the frame.

I won't / describe for you the sense of dull occasion / that soaks the degrees of this day, fifty– / eight of them at least, hot salty sap / running out of my eyes and lying where / it lies. That's wrong.

The room: Reagan era red, fake / curtains, silk fishtail fern, mustard / satin bed spread. Midwestern painted / rainbows. She’s got a cold / from her two-year-old. / The other woman talk over / the procedure. The someone holding / her hand, not her husband. That you are afraid of dying when you are trying to find your life.

This is what allows me to act. Her hands warmed by the mug. The mug hot from the coffee. The coffee boiled by the kettle. The kettle scalded by the stove. The stove ignited by the match. The match struck by her hands. Trying to listen to who is speaking.

your own importance cannot stand still

I threw the coins in the water in such a way I almost moved.

as if I could perform such impossible / pleasantrie

There is no room for me except what I can carry too

Either way we must revise / the ship we sail in.

A man holds up a mirror and kills her... nothing mythical about that

It’s obvious, but the trouble remains sorting my desire from desire.

the part you always forget is that / it’s actually happening. Sometimes at night I sit in the kitchen and arrange sugar cubes / on the windowsill.

43. Believe in what will die before you will.

I don’t know how to kneel / properly among these flowers. It’s January. Every agate is an expert / at breaking and repairing.

A question resembling a law. A law resembling a legend. Death as a challenge. A challenge to biological irony.

This is to say, everything happens underground.

if you feel yourself / becoming stranger howdy stranger

the word 'cure' is a Rubik’s cube I turn over and over and over

She lived and it was unremarkable" Everything tastes so much better when your muscles pain like that.

The shadow and the actual, what's the difference? They may say to us, the nest has been destroyed, or the hunter escapes.

I was knuckle-deep in pursuit, inching myself out like tickertape

I could do this for a living I alleged outloud as long as I’m awake revolution is repetition

How many ways are there to know? How many of those ways can be in poems?

I have been looking for ways to show thanks for a gift that I do not understand.

any little floss / clichéd / today / any cheat

Oldest trick in the book, when the garden becomes paradise.

But we live in a world where most things are like fish.

It is sad when you are looking at the ocean and you think _the_ _ocean is so beautiful_

The monster: a thing, a place, unseen, an absence, an other, a growth, a feeling, inside, beside, right here, in the bright sun.

For a writer, the most primal form of shelter is a word.

because you can’t always love somebody and their work

Try reading poetry to an idiot dog.

I am again caught with the problem of the page and the anxiety of composition.

Forgiveness is a grass that grows at the edge of the / desert

she helps / us write / tie / the hot / throats up

I wrap my idea of love / around a china bone: I am getting tired

I have sex / with myself to see / who I belong to.

I aged / rapidly like a broken piano I pulled / the emergency break

they are always teasing you with their candy or sucking their / golden teeth