Limits

You know this laptop, this Android is more capable than
Apollo 11. The moon’s lonely distance. We hold such tiny

comforts in our vastness of insignificance. Circuitboards run
their own marathon and electricity flows through them. Me,

I don’t believe I am a spaceship even though we live on one,
cruising through the uninhabitable zero against all odds,

each of us wired with biological programming. Darwin,
am I your darling? And I am, and you are – the product

of the grass that tastes like cirrhosis to me, the way it dries
rigid in the sun after heavy rain. What I need is something –

someone – to clear my mind, to absolve my white noise
of hayweeds, the rumba of cardiological time. My heart

does not follow logic, it follows pheromones, the way each
pleasurable thing leads to the next until all pleasure has been

scrubbed raw from the stars, that their gleaming was
always my imagination projected in the faintest way.

 

(originally published in Confluence, Spring 2020)

The Similarities

between you both are more Picasso
Pollack than Leibovitz     however
much I disengage    the Oculus will never
be Pennsylvania    though I have advanced
technology in my pocket    (I still have
the broken faces we captured)  I seek
the thin thread between real   what
I wish to be real   where I want to go
if time ever bends into black hole
I’ll head back home to Ohio and give
a hug to everyone    I somehow love
as an alarm    or Chekhov’s gun
telling   you are the people I still love
in the future you will reassemble into
magazine collage   and still resemble
the hummus-stained server in 2012

 

(originally published in Bindweed Magazine, Winter 2020)

Watering a Flower

  

Meditation is mellifluous
melody ignoring the choo-
choo train inside my head,

but I have been growing
better, forth in time.
There are meadows

I will never enter – renter
of everything. Nothing I meet
in this life I keep. Honest. Lover

bearing forever strands
of hair? God, infinity is
so infinite when glimpsed.

Such the rose moon
grows on this
specific sky.

(originally published in Count Seeds With Me, Spring 2022)

Boats Towers

boat with a big air ice tower
ice tower
universal wakeboard
boats
boat tower
universal wakeboard tower
wakeboard towers for sale
wake tower
ice boat air tower
boat wakeboard tower
boat towers for sale
for sail boats air
cheap wakeboard tower
folding wakeboard tower
tower collapsible
collapsible wakeboard
universal collapsible
folding wakeboard air
boat towers
tower boat
drown tower
for sale tower
boat big ice boat
boat wakeboat
sail cheap
for sale

 

 

(originally published in eGoPHobia, Fall 2019)

Grandview Heights

I need this walk through the suburbs
    summer heat has me a certain way
    lovers have me a certain way

I need to clear my head with the zen
of weedwackers droning, an SUV’s blur and
whoosh, lawnmowers torturing the grass–

white noise, white birds, white hybrids.
walked with white sneakers in the mud
last night drunk in the rain through an alley

(originally published in RASPUTIN, Winter 2020)

city-data.com

In my living-in-my-car days I wandered the country wild
and thought often of my mom, slipping anew on the verge
in waking nightmares: silhouette with angled knife at
my car window. Never peace, even in sleep, though I
was lucky, had a roof, silver shining. A Ford Fiesta
occupied. I’ve had a house broken into but I wasn’t there
so it never felt like it actually happened, and the thief
took nothing I could remember missing except the mirage
of having control. But living in my car I knew separation
only by windows, fragile and claustrophobic. I slept in the
backseat and thought that would give me an extra second, if
needed. Sleeping in Walmart parking lots I hoped to be
able to see my mother again and I lied on the phone,
verbally lowering crime rates for cities I slept in.

 

(originally published in Ghost City Review, Spring 2020)

Thlok

Thlok when drunk.
Thlok for deer.
Thlok for you to fail.
Thlok when you can’t thlok.
Thlok chips on the poker table.
Thlok your name being called.
Thlok falls down.
Thlok shut up.
Thlok talk about their children.
Thlok hard work.
Thlok jolt a finger.
Thlok beer poured into a glass.
Thlok guitar pedal.
Thlok your partner.
Thlok caw.
Thlok you have no interest in.
Thlok two packs a day.
Thlok typing with mitts.
Thlok silent manner.
Thlok urinate.
Thlok wind machine.
Thlok monster.
Thlok opinion without listening.
Thlok fast asleep.
Thlok two big sticks.
Thlok fish swims away.
Thlok across the street.
Thlok thawing snow in spring.
Thlok thoughts during sex.
Thlok man mansplaining thlok.

(originally published in The Disappointed Housewife, Summer 2021)