Terrapins coast backward in a river heads pointing north while their bodies travel south. Soda cans, too, lean against the flow. You are a mouth I turn my back to.
2
How many hooks does a room need? One for the heart one for the eye and one for the mind, so I can sleep.
3
My eyes are a window. My fingernails are TV windows. And my moles are little windows like stars are windows to what's behind that black.
4
TV casts its blue ghosts on me more cadaver than sky more bruise than moon but at least it distracts from the empty next-to-me.
5
She crunches kibble from her bowl by my bed with that sound like rolling marbles in a mouth, and something in the way she is alive equals lullaby.
6
The alarm ticks off and I miserably hit it then fix on the ceiling whose white starts spreading like a leak who slowly forms the shape of an ocean liner I try and try again to blink away. I squeeze my lids a hundred times before I see it's me who's pressing up.
7
Dear Today, Please let me not roll my same old rocks uphill. I want to be Lothario who makes no wrong moves.
8
I'd like to think it's because I look like a celebrity, or that I have a piece of lettuce stuck in my teeth, to solicit such staring— and not that anger heats to boil inside because you can't tell what I am.
9
I dream a dream where your eyes green and your hair blacks and your skin is a visage of red where I've put it in my mouth.
10
I go missing in a mass of pens and pencils the way a peppered moth won't be seen on a bed of lichen.
Desire / Leslie Marcus
Kari says Desires make now disappear while I sit watching work wander like cows wondering when I'll get to feel like a boy again, let your hip bones sleeve me.
12
I look up into blue so flossy you can smell it. A crow enters sharp left, and I wince, oil on ocean.
13
We all have avoirdupois like Justice's arms or a motorcycle's sidecar. Mine is a devil of dirt sanding down my eyes.
14
Wasn't there a poem once that talked about the office how its pencils marched and broke the will of whomever was sitting in that chair? Didn't Wallace Stevens sell insurance?
15
I live in a city where people who nearly kill you with their cars re-bless you with a wave in the rear-view.
16
In the 50s it was what if something goes wrong? My parents bought so much insurance— Now it's who cares? I go months without health, never fancy long-term life.
17
I am a hero walking uphill in the fog remembering when you took me in your car to Twin Peaks and let the windows fog up and me have my way.
18
Your stippling lips tattoo me— blade on my neck, heart carved in a trunk.
19
And now is not the time of then nor is it the time of next— It is the time of waiting not long enough to start something new nor finish something old, but just enough to imagine the worst.
20
I press you into a rock wall with my hips— below us, cornrows stripe a plain of fireflies tapping out an en masse SOS: let's pretend we're stars at stage-edge squinting into the camera flashes of fans; let's raise our sweaty arms up and take them in, like a yawn.
21
Somewhere someone didn't make it through today. I am lucky in a room of 36 people just like me, the only girl.
22
I accidentally ate e.e.'s small hands and my mind has become an adding machine at the mercy of someone really good with adding machines.
23
My father Fed-Exed me Conversations with God 1, 2, and 3— I keep reading it before bed like a prayer.
24
I know it's wrong to make deals but if you just let me sleep through one night— please let me sleep through this night.