Poetry

My therapist says a boy with a secret
is easy to control. I wonder how
Steve learned mine, if I told him

in exchange for a public chance at a longer private life, you give them
not your body, but your body’s one error in calculation. the swerve,

At just the age the unconscious
cheerleader was []
by four football players,
I suspect I was []
by Steve. 

She’d gathered ramps in the woods, although she found them 
A hyperbole of the food world, an over-priced scallion

With a finish of garlic scapes. But finding them in the forest, 
He thought, and picking them with her strong hands,

Steve, though he’d cut you
if you crossed him, drop you like a sack
of potatoes if you came at him drunk
like Randy Parr in the backyard,

This is the year strangers
will say terrible things

about you 

There would have been chaos,
confetti mined from the cliffs
of Michoacán. 

The “Lyric I” tied its sheets together and flew the coop, confessed itself off the balcony.