The refinery amid the marshland /of my earliest memories // repeats itself on the Gulf—

a moon the size of Neptune / rising from the green muck like ectoplasmic / crossfire.

Like any good flame / I tapered, acquiescing / to my extinction.

i don’t want to ___________________ about this.

to bury a Black body / not out of respect for life / but to prevent disease // and cut the stench / and if a cross is laid on / the mound of dirt

In your next life, you plan to be an animal / impenetrable by a knife.

They asked me where I wanted / to put my missing watermelon. / Not the watermelon but the missing / of it.

A headline reads: NASA warns alien life might not be fuckable. / An op-ed, hopefully.

Let us recognise “dad bod” as another / crystallization of sexism.

Source text: Fascinating Womanhood by Helen Andelin, originally self-published in 1963. These erasures were composed upon pages of the mass-market paperback, published by Random House, 1982.

Source text: Fascinating Womanhood by Helen Andelin, originally self-published in 1963. These erasures were composed upon pages of the mass-market paperback, published by Random House, 1982.

you cannot grow faster than you can rot.

As a child, I drank black goo made from herbs so bitter it tasted like the earth. Mother taught me to / chase it with Haw Flakes, pink candy shaped like coins. Mother taught me to swallow many moons.

If she emptied her hands / of this weight, my face / would fall from the ground, / scattering below her feet again.

he can't sort mail or carry / library books to his car. he can’t give the tiny disco / ball dangling from his rearview mirror a spin.

Fresh from the ER, I drove round a parade / ground empty but for peepal trees and a row // of slumbering buses.

When I was 12, dad took me to the darkroom to help him develop film. He wanted to show me the enlarger, the dangerous developer liquid, and why red light won’t react with silver salt.

Buried on the side of I-20, covered in red maples: the Pro-Life Memorial in St. Joseph, Iowa. A stretch of fenced-in earth, speared with a thousand tiny crosses for all the aborted “children” …

Now, I daydream about blue light, fever, freak weather. Once, it rained in late August and for several miles I walked beside B, both of us sharing an eggplant-purple umbrella, untouching except for …

After something like this, the rabbi told me, there are no good answers.