Supermarket Horse
Listen to the palpitating of this horse / heart and I will answer in the language // underneath this skin.
Deer Lord / Dear Lord
The boys have never seen him, don’t believe he’s real, but the girls all whisper about the latest boogeyman, the Deer Lord they see outside their bedroom windows at night; the deer who wears a human skull over his own face.
my true self is grocery shopping
I don’t own a cheese grater.
capitalism makes this okay.
The Burial of a Woman Known as China Mary
Once, I offered pieces of myself to every
man—my hands, my coins, my words—
Garbage to Curb
I’m instantly reminded of why I skipped the last few of these—the room is all hot breath and squeezed shoulders, and I have two giants in front of me blocking my view. One wears a blue topcloth with the words Garbage to Curb carefully painted across the back, staring me in the face.
The Last Six Cookies in the Package
For the hole inside you, never filled: a stolen bag of cherries. Spit the pits into your hands and go to sleep with stained palms against your hard, round stomach, pretending you can feel kicking feet.
And So Shall the Carrion Call
The paths are unmarked, the trees wary of strangers. But I keep dried fish on hand, honeysuckle, ropes and knives, for the rare occasion of company.
When the Village Goes Hungry
A sister’s dry palm in my left, a sister’s wet palm in my right, the winter wind there on my throat; we sang the songs only learned at midnight, when the ordinary and the secular slept.
Blow
Imagine her saying, as she settles, “Good God, Ben, my constant pessimist. Give it a rest. I’m not here to fry.” And imagine a pebble loosened from the clifftop, falling. Impacting her skull. There would be damage.
Ophelia in the Badlands
In my history, I was the prettiest girl
in town who was seduced
by the summer eclipse or the hellion who stole the keys
of Daddy’s 1958 Impala
The Chimney Always Survives
There’s nothing quite so sinister as a hot wind on a California night.
Boba Talk
You bump into White Boy on a parched, irreverent Wednesday morning, power-walking your way to line up for the three hour commute at 6 AM, and too loud he announces, I am in love with your country.
You Swallow a Super Moon and a Doctor You Have Never Met Prescribes Prednisone
Last week I / courted the moon from a stop sign.
Forbidden Birth
I found you bitty in a snap pea, plucked you out and swallowed you whole, / rivered your body through my insides and grew it quietly. What bad men? we say.
The Space of Continuous Decline
I'll give you until midnight, she said, and I could tell she meant it. She opened her eyes wide so that her mascaraed lashes stood out like the rays of small black suns.
to say i want to take a big glorious shit,
the kind that stinks like shit & empties you. to say i can’t, for whatever reason, take this shit, but for days now have felt like i need to.
The Farmer’s Daughter
You’re not the one in the bathtub with screams stuffed like wet rags down her throat, the girl who eats herself inside out with silence, who so desperately needs some help right about now but does not want to be a bother.
The Things We Do for Love
You decide I’m going to shoot myself out of a cannon this coming Sunday. “How romantic,” you coo, even though it was your idea in the first place.
Sappho and Sappho and I, Sappho
I eat paintings the way a woman eats bibles — in the back corners of used book stores, the cracked leather and faux gilt burn her