Poetry

It was actually a good year, the year before the downfall, a surprisingly good year in our little town. It was a year of bread on the table, a year with a new IPA in our glasses, a year with friends who visited with great frequency.

To...

A good place to hide a drop of water is a stream.
A good place to hide a stream is beneath an ocean. 

A good place to hide a man is among thousands
of other men. Watch how they rush
through the city like water through a ravine. 

I fell on an incline, talus, tibia, fibula, calcaneal tendon mangled, 
red circuits ruptured, body facing east toward a little town named 
Climax and then New York where I once danced in a circle of girls 

On my way to the fertility clinic,

                                  I pass five dead animals.

First a raccoon with all four paws to the sky
               like he’s going to catch whatever bullshit load falls on him next.

Where is the drug to drug this feeling out of me, the drug 
to drug away the fear of drugs and what they steal from me 

I’m driving down to Tennessee, but before I get there, I stop at the Kentucky state line to fuel up and pee. The dog’s in the car and the weather’s fine. As I pump the gas a man in his black Ford F150 yells out his window about my body. I...

The lambs this year are dumb but lambs are dumb
their tiny brains archaic smiles humans to a lamb 

After your father gets lost for the third time,
      you get angry because he won’t answer his phone.
Part of me wants him to stay lost. God, what has stolen my generosity? 

I dreamed of it again, my dad’s body lost to us again but finally 
found again, we set him in Dickinson’s coffin, wooden, painted 
white, where had his body been all these years, things felt strange, 

I count gulls until they spasm
into numbers, until I grasp
a number never uttered.