your drunken bed / the absinthe
& worm / I waited / in the candle
-light for dead lovers / two apartments
ago / downtown / how the spirits
summoned / lingering
lust / cigarette smoke
living / rooms stained
sweatshirts / rugburn turtle
couches / bleeding
fabric / and sex
(originally published in streetcake, Summer 2019)
I want to fold the dog
into an origami pipe
smoke it
and forget this
was ever a dog
later I will want
this dog nestled
next to me
asleep
fire lingering
instead I
fold creases
into blanket
wrapping
out the cold
I can’t shake
but for what
it takes
to sleep
through dawn
(originally published in Succor, 2017)
we’re on a playground of mosquitos
finding poems about space and math
to read because his brother’s in town
and he’s an idealistic futurist
so they trade science poems
and smoke and dreams (a glass
of water the tides of Lake Erie)
I ask which Little Caesar’s location
is your favorite all time (five dollar
orange brown cardboard. gas
station lighters burning thumbs)
everyone answers the one in my hometown
and we’re 1997 sitting in a mildew basement
sketching cartoons in blue binders on greasy
carpets full of the future waiting for the future
and mallards in the pond sing all wing and trouble
hoping for something to disturb the water
so they can fly
(originally published in Pouch)
Before you had a name, you were a stranger
searching for one.
Gravel, asphalt, salt, and stone–
I pieced you together, a church from scratch,
your holiness in my uttered breaths
of limestone, mortar, love…
your tall steeple stabbed the sky.
I could hear clouds dissipate,
crows caw and congregate
in our mutual worship of you.
Maybe you never needed a name.
When you vanished, my heart
reconstructed itself with God’s rubble,
compounded from type-two plastic,
Coca-Cola cans, rubber bands…
I never learned your name. With my mouth,
my body aflame, your steeple burned.
Bricks and timber screened
the sky. The smoke and fade–
the gray, the fog– that
was your name.
(originally published in Pudding Magazine, Winter 2016)
because I repeatedly disregard that which is shaped like a diamond
to be a diamond,
I will flirt with the skateboard girl
who zooms away
& lament our love, lost
as yesterday’s blackened ganja.
living on the beach,
scraping sand
for a seagull’s Dorito–
we are crevices in the Santa Monica boardwalk.
we slip out from ourselves
without knowing
yet know ourselves sunken
deep in the tar ocean
& yet, somewhere, still there
from many years of being the ones
who collect what others discard,
making space in our own diamond-shaped boxes
(originally published in Eunoia Review, February 2016)
in the future i’d be watching you smoke
cigarettes
waving your smoke away
with cleaver hands
breakfast would come
we’d slice cucumbers in the wet-
snake leather kitchen
rectangular blade neatly fit
sink-soaked
the yolk in the sandwich a little drippy
warm & familiar
the electric stampede of spiders’ feet
never did the future weave
faint spiderweb strands
(originally published in Sobotka Literary Magazine – Issue #3)
my mouth & cigarette smoke
like chewed lipstick.
faces clung with intertwined tongue
sweat, turtle. the lotioned hand.
grip now. hold.
(originally published in Vine Leaves Literary Journal – Issue #14)