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.
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.
Relics, Registries, and Other Bastard Things
My birth certificate is an inventory of negative space. FATHER'S NAME. FATHER'S PLACE OF BIRTH. FATHER'S AGE. All of these data fields are empty, clean of the typewriter keystrokes that might otherwise list all the facts my mother knew.
Natural
(Watching Blue Planet II in Bed with My Wife)
It’s been a while since I rooted for a straight romance, but I can’t help gunning for this little blenny. He’s turned himself completely black except for his one bright orange fin and now is doing a hell of a seductive dance for the ladyfish.
chordata
we teach ourselves to crack without spilling over / the egg before it does not hatch
Nargis
Nargis hits and we belch out thought and memory. / Overturned electric lines crackle with teeth.
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.
Did the Water
The girls climb down under the bridge. Below them, the river is dark and still, a surface so solid it almost doesn’t look like it could drown you.
Lollie
Bounce on the floor. Suckle me his absurd Hubba Bubba chew by chew chewing will I? No.
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