I crossed the tormented plaza. / No trace of the saint. / Even the rats were fleeing / from the fast gathering storm.

How young his tear-stained face, crumbling under / the fluorescents. Unbalanced on the stool in front of class. / Dogs have to be trained to fight, conditioned / to violence, like humans. He told us how he trained him

but it all turned out to be the Tetris theme and they could remember no other, no Pac-Man, no Galaga, no Ms. Pac-Man (did she have her own? almost certainly not, the rats think), was there a …

I eat off old plates here, my grandparents’ / grandparents’, translucent to age, a blue // light, that, snowlike, settles in the kitchen. I own no others / yet. Over dinner, I dream of …

As always the end begins / with a social media post / by the president of the United States / about the size of our nation’s nuclear button / compared to a foreign / dictator’s. As …

i dove into you eclipse first just like joni / strung out on another man. one man then / another i drifted down the russian river

Don’t ask me how I got the job. / I had no experience. / I was nineteen; / I had given everything up, / my salvation included.

Somehow in every / nationality, His beard / connects.

the poem opens for me no matter. a blood-letting riot / absorb the symptoms, interpret the malady, erupt / into nummular hives & feign resolve. no more breaking /

My friends don’t come over to help me / sort through my mother’s things. / The ashtrays. The bills. The navy blue suits. / No one brings me a home / cooked meal. I don’t belong

I swear / he yelled at me like I had plans / to set the field on fire in my sports bra

The dogs are bored. The children are bored. I was never / a child

I birthed her. And when I think back it is like / a nearly drowned head cutting the water’s surface.

People are afraid of my memory and they should be.

A scatter of crows came to me / and I could not refuse them

Days I can’t feel you, I dive my body / into the deep end, pluck golden leaves / from the silty bottom, nearly drown

The shoebill pesters its mother for a drink, says David Attenborough.

I can’t write about breasts without thinking of damselflies stinging the surface of water.

My father / carried me often like a dead deer // on his shoulders up the stairs to bed, / my arms and legs gripped before his body, // my fallen neck bobbing

The book of Ezekiel opens / with a windstorm.