“worms inch

his nostrils and build

homes eggs hatch behind

glass eyes mother tells

me to pull the meat

off the bones it’ll

freeze well i puke”

“That’s the face of someone with a broken heart. One teenager peeks over her shoulder at the women behind her. But she can’t be heartbroken, the teenager says, pointing towards the stage. Look at the way she glows.”

“They avoid the family-friendly path, brush past the hikers beware sign and into the tallgrass Fire Loop where anything can happen from the waist down.”

“You decided at the age of nine when your mom left your dad in Chicago and moved back in with her parents in Hawaii, giving you a dozen chicks in his place, that if you couldn’t do this you had no business eating meat, or raising animals, and should probably leave the island altogether.”

“May 6, 1942, Richard wrote Toto, ‘I can’t tell you anything about our movements or what we are doing, but I can tell you that it looks like we are going to be in the thick of things before long.’”

“Sadie despised being alone, but she also despised most people, and thus led a life of conflict. When the pandemic came and everything locked down and locked out, this conflict bloomed.”

“one line or two from poem. / use space slash space to indicate line breaks

“I never learned the value of letting decay and active rest refine me. Instead, I gathered perfection around me like a shield. It protected me, and trapped me in.”

“ I do appreciate things that scare me a little, I suppose, though not necessarily reptiles. I wonder if that’s why I’m still seeing Lena and Janice, my long-time girlfriend who is also still married, though separated, doesn’t know about it.”

“Since you’ve gone, I’ve watched rerun clips / of SNL, Norm McDonald as Burt Reynolds on Jeopardy, /young Will Ferrell bland as Trebek—I laughed, maybe”

“‘Violet does not compliment my personality, we both know this,’ I say. Selina looks down at her nails on the counter, they are long and silver, obviously fake.”

“Close ups of the court, / our sneakers against the asphalt, / your fingertips stagnant.”

“You pull into the last parking spot. You notice you parked a little crooked and want to reverse to straighten up, but there’s a white car with tinted windows behind you.”

“We are sharing the big bathtub / of life, tan toes and blonde hair / snaking down the drain, pulling / at the pipework.”

“We didn’t always have to drive thirteen hours for a peach, but the third year After the People Disappeared, a brutal winter killed the peach trees in southern Michigan. This would be our last peach pilgrimage. “

“Remember when Mom sent us that travel UV, shaped like a dildo?”

“I’ll whisper the end of the love story I started / in 1993 and you can tell me about heaven”

“After watching Black Panther 2 / the man next to me sobs / each inhale heavy”

“When I was twelve the dam broke. It had been built under the direction of William Mulholland. The morning of the flood, the dam keeper noticed a muddy leak and called Mulholland, who said not to worry.”

“ He showed me how to eat a tamarind pod. I told him I’d been drying seeds in the pandemic and asked if tamarind could grow up here. “I don’t know,” he said, “but if they can, it’ll take a couple of years.”