something in the
air chases cattle
‘neath the elm
five.seven.funk
something in the
air chases cattle
‘neath the elm
ants at the threshold
heat lightning decides it needs
what the clouds have
I wish I had taught
the algorithm better.
Now it teaches me.
Pretending I had
anyone to text.
Smokers’ patio.
And yet we
accumulate elders. High humidity,
no rain.
I left you with your
shoulders stiff like the shelf of
a crepe myrtle pruned.
You want to believe
you can record a moment
not already paused and posing.
a garbage truck arm
paused at its apex / your face
at the brink of thought
We owe ourselves a
ballad. Verse upon verse with
an insistent plot.
We owe ourselves a
ballad with choruses we
don’t already know.
We’ll never really
Bury letting hundreds of
Thousands of us go.
The venter of love
is a threat. A canopy under
which I’m dared to walk.
a mere couch between
your famous intimacy
and my novel retreat
Radio versus
the unrelenting glare of
Grief the Mutator
Class Daddy worships
river-born debris and damns
river-borne debris.
when squirrel chatter bleeds
into rocking chair creak, I
recollect delinquent gods
Fathers, sprinklers, false
memories slake the worst from
this mean solar day.
The moths of all time
fill the sky at once, and we
insist that was then.
Now Church by the Glades,
now Bank of the Ozarks, next
Police of the Pines.
I, too, have many
aunts, and some distant cousin
added okra to me.
Wood grain marks change that
no longer ripples. Instead
we farm wind and wave.
Been busy in my
other future — long walks, still,
but nearer to you.
y’all trying so hard
to sink our dinghy while the
yacht bears down on us
Take our taxes, take
arms against us. But we have
hands and history.
Fresh from the Frog, it’s
an all-new Gilmore Girls! Can
Rory face the void?
like hydrogen in
water fearing oxygen,
we split and vanish
like eye under lid,
paused before a warm wall, we
mime instead of rest
With Rugrats and my
grandparents gone, when will I
hear Yiddish again?
if only i had
given up dreams and hobbies
a little slower
backseat babies pressed
by the songs our fathers sold
to our mothers’ vans
set free with nothing
to do besides believe in
hand plus soap plus hand
My first decade was
its last — a baton pass I
thought I could handle.
Careen through rivers
alluvium, past that dock
you dreamed, dockless kid.
in a recent book
on our obscure uncle, we
source basal ruin
you sure raise your risk
for someone who hates fate for
having favorites
now the oddest things
in my dreams are just crowds, but
I don’t wake safer
not knowing what it’s
like to not be chased, I
might not slow to mourn
don’t let those bastards
built of bluster and pinot
tell you they’re trying
you can’t start a duel
without a glove; my doubts would
kill for that much style
skip the microwave
let coffee reheat coffee
distance cure distance
Our clothing is wrong
and houses are clothing now.
Stay away, undress.
The most amazing
thing about a detail is
it’s chosen. Oh boy!
an adult
visitor
trespasser from birth
What’s been between us
when we meet: walls, time, self, tech,
and now walls again.
Will fall follow once
we’ve been swallowed by the snake
that ate our summer?
Will you sing back when
I’m retired, down-mountain
and ever-denimed?
Could get by broken
until you slipped like a syll-
able from mem’ry
2 worry about
death is 2 die twice but we
gotta kill some time
SHOW ME MAGIC: a
wizard weaving safety from
my lizard synapse
but I’ll never be
as clean as the pocket at
the core of a bird
Born a pepita
and paid in pumpkins, ‘course I
thought wages were fate
Dropped that oil coin and
all waters of the state of
Alabama rose
Stuck in a pose you
learned from “Yoga for Mourning
Carrie Fisher.”
the town’s two fiddlers
serve twelve bands and I can’t keep
my thyme from browning
You told me, purpling,
“I am the Moscow of pain.”
Meaning what? You’ve won?
torn from the berm: a
lawfully weeded wife, a
legal gardenia
if shrugs were lightning
and thunder were an eye roll,
i’d leave you droughtless
it’s night that falls but
day that breaks and so you pay
for all my mistakes
build and burn at once,
I’ve learned in my career as
a boom carpenter
hard drying on a
mattress that’s sponged the sweat of
a thousand fevers
what left my chest I’d
clenched desperately like oak
under grip of squirrel
a letter arrives
from where your lover is from:
“Sorry. Best wishes,”
stories have been told
over the course of the word
“go,” so please talk slow
when I’m anxious, I
consider the fluorescence
of chickens and eggs
After the decade we’ve
had—how not to ooze gnat and
oleaginy?
Weak tea. And using
goat cheese, I paint my toast the
color of goat cheese.
you had something sharp
to play once, but now you’re caught
throwing rock paper
nuke drills, civil rights:
we have to re-litigate
too much in this life
Too poor for modern
disco, so we blinked so hard,
so fast we migrained.
Left my tadpole ass
behind: a gift for science
for posterity.
things that cover ground:
horse, guitar, hebrews, frost.
some riffs just get lost.
you must’ve witnessed
me mock the sound of you when
you are wuthering