Poetry

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,

Pink Floyd’s Animals
drones through a thin
dreamless sleep I keep

each day you wake wishing that what is, is not, and that’s no way to live.

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

All the rain in the world

is falling, making
a door you can’t open.