And if they’re missing / in inaction, forgive them / Their useless pearls, nouns

I have a worm / beneath my hair — / a future worm, / a nerve / from the eternal / present.

One night, my father will come home late with a rifle in his hands / yelling “I’m here.” Everyone will laugh. / Every corner of the ocean is the same.

The return trip has a map already. Surviving in sugar waters, in rhythms of algae. / The earth in the hollow is breaking—I knew it instinctively, and in my mind, insects were swarming, traversing …

And did we come to some conclusion about who set fire to the Master’s House / The autumn-petal of it, swinging flame on the black bough of the sky?

It means to want so badly. / How close win is to want is the distance / between his fast ball & her face.

Head full of fishes. Someone says complicate the blue. I do. I do. I do.

Tonight, I am all joint and animal dark. My heel blots out the moon, / vanishes the small nod of light. And yes, / I prayed today, verging into my bismillah before settling / on the broken.

I wonder when you push at mirrors, if they slip off in your hands. I would / like to hold you, who you were at sixteen with the you I was when I was / sixteen.

At sixteen, life is supposed to be safe. Things are supposed to be beginning. We are supposed to be weaning from the care and guidance of people who have raised us. We are supposed to be on the brink …

Not fossil not decay unfurls / A shining ladder and makes / Rescue all. In movies / Lets loose, tears off

A neighbor assures me not to worry when the dog eats / rabbit flesh flattened on the street. Uncooked bones / are not sharp enough to hurt, turn an animal inside out.

It was night / Death slept naked / on God’s corpse

Like those jellyfish that swell with future oxygen, / I live into my gender, balloon constantly rising

Triple check the joist hooked / from your garage ceiling / is rated for at least 97 pounds.

I still very much care about that idea of measurable quality; the idea that a consensus can exist between serious readers about what is great and what is merely good.

...attending, as Hoagland did, to how white male hegemony produces and reproduces itself constitutes a valuable step, I think, in naming and deconstructing that hegemony, in refusing to accept it as …

I know happiness is chemical. & that I exist. As: an intense state of longing / punctuated by quick sparks of contentment. As: a body not allowed to pursue / its own pleasure. So, it becomes …

swore I’d be a casual bride. The dress code nonexistent (I shant have lied), beer in cans. I wanted, only, a single gerbera daisy placed in each glass bottle. Red. Just that. I only browsed the …

I am forever concerned / for the quality of the breast milk / I’ll never make.