Fuck the Carburetor
I was just out of high school.
Yes, I said, I am a bookkeeper,
when I’d had only one year of
numbers a few decimals short
of failure.
Poems
The Fire This Time
how much damn broke
does it take to want to
burn just before class
lung green with chaos
My 88-Year-Old Mother-in-Law Decides to Make New Year’s Resolutions
and I want to say, oh, Rose, why? but there’s no way to pass the prime
rib and pretend the words You’ll be dead soon enough aren’t standing
behind her, waiting to be said.
Picnic
Ghazals have always struck me as a literary picnic—a checkerboard blanket brimming with many different dishes composed of unique couplets. This modified, collaborative ghazal, with its ‘No-Thing-ness’ whimsicality served up alongside more serious stanzas, unpacks a memorable conversation for us all under the summer afternoon sun.
Parking Meter
If a slot machine is a one-armed bandit,
what does that make you? A cyclopean
troll? I don’t think it will catch on.
Anti-Aubade
You shuffle through your waking house as though
the miracle of dawn does not deserve
acknowledgement, as though the way you go
downstairs, through doorways in the dark, and swerve