This was in the late morning, Sun. You threw down the heat there too. We took the cloud of blackbirds as a sign and got moving, but Colleen didn’t like the quiet.

What’s this book about? she always asks, and I read her my favorite part with the fig tree, the fruit

I finally relented and placed one on a tea towel next to my pillow. It made a startled little snore.

Scry-skapers horporate saidquarters mirrored mansions grancy feed-towers daring town the latural nandscape

I slipped a dream or two between pages 102 and 103 of the handsome volume of poems on my bedside table. Like you would a leaf. The one collected from the pile under the Oak’s shadow.

I’m on the sidewalk opposite Verdi Square kissing a married woman passionately and thinking oh my god you fool what are you doing because

Everything here is the same—the same faded streetlights and the same fast food and the same homeless people lining the space between buildings.

The cold rain at 2 a.m. beats against America, and by then you had already left. A ghost, two clowns will dance on the ceiling until the sky turns grey-white.

A wizard, on the other hand, could cast spells with their wands. Radu had two Magic Wands instead of one. To double the power. Radu and the wands were inseparable.

The body itself is the wound, deep and deserving, skin/hair/breath all edges of the scab.  Muscle tension/eye strain, pain beneath the teeth, gentle reminders of the harbor itself.

Fade Into You melts down lumbar curvature. Gish, she sings her lullaby. No fissures form in the foundation, no 737 jet stream goodnight.

the way you stood at a stove stirring tall pots of beans in a dank soup kitchen            where tracked snow melted in pools

the height where space travel becomes animal instinct. The theory of constellations: take a cosmic razor to the horizon, where the spoils of day,

One. On the eve of your citizenship's trash day, and especially if you’re an eager beaver, wait until at least 7:30p to take your trash out to the curb. (9 or 10p is kinder, and 11p is kinder yet,

Today I turned. Today I turned and saw beyond the tapestry, beyond the glass, beyond the lattice, the bee, the bright leaves. I saw the rising smokes of Baghdad, New York, Dresden, Portland, Jericho, and Thebes.

“Please do not touch”, Or on labels where a child’s game lie paralysed in description, Where people come and gawk and say, this is spectacular!

I hear a frog croak in the dishwasher I wash a single memory down the sink look up above the toilet bowl  a painting of a housefly eating the head of another housefly

Call me Śiva, Call me Hijra, Call me Lucifer, Circe, Crow, Call me Ishmael, Hecate, Kālī, Call me Coyote, Loki, Toad.

Winter sound is blue and bell sudden. Shadows are knife blades. I was her nurse, butt wiper and cook. Still strong enough to hurl a bowl

it slipped then through the cracks lost on the highway of a life lived in layers of wanderings.

Yes, let justice be for twig and flea, ankle and feather in deep heather. A thousand tongues will praise me and none will beg my pardon, my inmates there all to declare I am a caring warden.