Somehow the lists got switched

so now when darkness trips

the streetlamps in a single flick

I stand on the porch and yell 

for Operation Total Fury

You can wake up to someone day after day and still they’ll appear disfigured somehow, pummeled by the early light.  

There are always reasons one begins to write an endless letter to someone who neither exists, nor ever wanted to. When I started, I was someone, too. Now, to keep going, I sit in the workshop, erasing.

They light their soft mustaches with the beating glow of their phones, jingling the hits and misses of a shooting game. They wave them in the air, “Over there,” they yell and disappear. Bugs are erect in the tall grass. I run toward the children, and they toward me, or away, and I run toward them again, barely missing. Their faces gleam green, pink, then red, and purple.

"Let me duck out of the olden days that I may be free now / somewhat over the choppy waves.

Last time I saw her, it was also during hurricane season, I said—there to inspect the land before it got washed away, I thought. She wanted to see what our constructed world was like before it was leveled again.

Like those whosay  light  accumulates — step closer understanding that weshudder at what youbuild.

Right when the building is reduced to rubble, I’m tying my shoes. I miss the best part. What a waste of waste.

J & C & I peel our greens

into trash bags a little fast

our tempos try to forget

debt’s discipline trash bags

of greens pile against the fence

I was turning the lichen in the cemetery into a meal, I was delicately harvesting the lichen that covers his mother’s gravestone and I was going to make a salad with it.

There was cruelty in the pits there were

Grace notes connoting invisible
Satisfactions there was a cloud 

Of purple exhaust glittering with

Fossil flowers & the looming 

Silhouettes of yet-to-be evolved birds.

Hector asked if anyone had run into Gloria. She’d had her last chemo on Friday, he said, which most of us already knew. But no one had seen her since then, all agreeing it was likely she had family in town. And what a marvel it was—I often thought this—knowing the intimate developments of near strangers’ lives. 

a conceptual shrimp uses its limbs to reshape the reader’s mind, mounding and clefting your mental world until it is the mental world of some other creature: shark, scallop, arthropod boiled down to pure flavor crunch.

It was my mother who taught me that hummingbirds don’t sleep: they fall into a state called torpor, which is deeper than sleep, more akin to hibernation.

I’m a little out of the loop.
Before the service, I buy breath mints
instead of flowers.
I wear the wrong shoes.
I leave my facial tissue in the car.

of mercy, this
is the oval egg
where mercy laid waste
and, wasted, layed
down her altar

“We can break the fourth wall. We’re writers—we do that.”

“I’m not that kind of writer,” I said.

I keep meaning to write a poem about something really smart.