House of Cards
you let victory linger / in your mouth until you forget its taste, /remember its shape.
Even This Place Once Had a Mother
Now that the car I was made in is gone, I wonder what will happen to me.
Schedule Snafu at the Cultural Center
We could be your favorite place in the city, a still monument to ground that’s always shifting.
The Hot Pitch Under
She could feel the hot pitch under her feet stretching both ways, boundless, like a solid ocean glowing at two opposing horizons.
Diptych: A Mr. 7 Hands Screwdriver and an Octopus Open Up About Their Relationship
As you can probably imagine, the hardest part was we never knew what to do with that eighth tentacle.
Seven Minutes
My cousin got a reputation at school, and she said reputations are like ghosts. Once they decide to haunt you, there’s nothing you can do to get rid of them.
The Young Ones
I’d waited for him to come to my side of the room, had been pretending to admire, for too long, something that looked as though it had once been Apollo and Daphne but was now melting like hot wax.
In the Long Grass
Surreal moment, this: a roo lounging on a road in the middle of the day, a horseshoe of people staring down at him like he’s some sort of a prophet—or an omen.
In a Dream I Speak Perfect Mandarin
vague shape of a person, perhaps made up
of broken seashells : the sound of fractured edges toned
FISH
He hovers over her, like Goldie after Kurt, as she floats and undulates in her half-dreams, me staring out the window, wondering if the fish might be dying rather than giving birth.
Domestic Realism
my mother married a willow tree on a hilltop, sat under its boughs through four decades of rain in a day
Sugarloaf
Horses and earth are just different shades of each other, and we start to disappear, all of us, into the thickets of leaf and shadow.
The Florida Museum of Natural History
There’s a swing to Jessica’s step that reminds me of nights spent in a cloud of citronella, chasing lizards through my backyard.
Wishing on the Solid Gold Inamorato
I was probably a maniac beyond salvation. That’s why I needed to meet with the Solid Gold Inamorato.
Two Poems
The past is an animal with its teeth bared.
ON WORLDBUILDING
and she’ll never die, and we won’t either.
Girl and Her Spiders
I knew what a brown recluse spider looked like before I ever met a queer person my age.
Lord Randall
At first it’s just a low feeling at the base of your tum, a knot being tied, but then it tugs like a rope being pulled at both ends by a pair of black hogs
The Other Mary Owen
She imagines the Other Mary Owen sunning herself on a terrace in Mykonos, reservations purchased with the real Mary’s stolen credit card.
The Bone House
Everyone knows when you build a bone house that you start with the front.