2015 In another life, I had Houston.  I was wearing the wrong shoes  trying to walk quietly through  The Menil Collection,  where you aren’t allowed to get married— something I didn’t …

Why hide? To be found. Why be found?

When you greeted each other / your palms / like embers in cigarette stubs / red and hot / showed from your sleeves

If I had known all boats eventually yield / to the current, I would have readied myself / long ago

SAFE Employees make a SAFE railroad. With SAFE employees, a railroad devoid of any mechanical safety devices CAN and WILL be operated safely.

You return, at last. / At the edge no longer./ At the margin’s curve no longer. / Circular no longer. / In the embers of unfading foam. / The sputum of inscrutable lava.

As they headed back into town in Smiley’s pickup, she could only feel like they had all done something wrong, something to be ashamed of. Something they could never talk about again.

As a witness should I run to her? Make sure she's not suffering a stroke or an aneurysm? I pictured a headline demanding the whereabouts of a witness who'd left the scene of a potential homicide.

Bars or no bars, if you did have something worth having, they’d take it, whether you were ridiculous about home security or not.

She understands the place she was born into is full of shadows. They slip into her open cracks, slide oozing into the gutters of her ribs, spill against the long, unbroken lines of her legs.

Why did he shape my brother’s body to the contours of war? Is this the shape of all our language already?

I'd never felt so sad engraving a trophy before, like I wanted to throw it away when I was done with it.

It’s not the contraption itself that I love—this pair of shells of steel and lace—but the woman who measures me and tests my straps as if armoring me for battle.

The other day I received my first offer for term life insurance (how are corporations so prescient?), which has the effect of reminding a man he’s going to die, just as a baby has the effect of …

It's easy in the sense that all you have to do is get in the car and fire up the app. It's hard in that it requires long, monotonous hours to be fruitful, and constant vigilance to stay safe. San …

You have found out that someone dies every two seconds. This shouldn’t make you feel better, but it does.

We think that Tinder is just for fun, swiping like in a videogame, like the 1980s game Frogger where the frog hops across the freeway and tries to avoid getting flattened by cars—this is how we …

Elsewhere, some later year, I’ll try to be good. Today I don’t care.

Before I am beautiful I'm in the hairdresser’s chair, / perched atop two phone books, holding my ear. My reflection / in the bathroom mirror is a landscape painting.

I love expectation // beauty subsumed