TMSIATOYOI

i wrote a poem when i was 7 
about everything i loved 

dotted computer glyph 
i called it:

The Morning Star
Is A Treasure 
Of Your Own Imagination

so certain,
of everything i loved,

my cat Bo Bo, sweet rice crackers
wrapped in seaweed, the curling poster
of children pushing a wagon sized tomato
on the wall

belonging to myself,
the poem
the place

cozy snail's shell adorned
with billions of pin holes,

glow in the dark green
flooding the edge's
edge

KEEP GIVING

curl up in an anti thought let it hum you 
sleepless, dreaming of a parsley farm 
blood like a message, real deal
face upside down in the mirror 
have you ever actually known? 

when i couldn't think about soft looks
without crying, connection ache
for sun, for baby animals, for the imprint of food
you set before me, powerless pleasure, 
steam in the shower, 
herbs of the earth

feeling this love as much as 
recalling not feeling 
this love, 

body of ocean,

and lightening

now practice reaching 
across yourself

SEWARD PARK

i walk the spit each day
military helicopters circling the peninsula for football on a Sunday,  
my friends and i monitor the brocean each summer, party barges that crowd 
the soft dips in the shore and, depending on mood,  i love to walk
beneath the old growth while rihanna or crazy bitch is carried by the water 
old men boat their dogs to shore to shit, the day drunk paddle board dates
collide, but it’s winter now and the park is peaceful dark,  
i walk the oval alone, my dad tripped there, my friend cried
into their belly over there, we kissed, ate melon, took pictures of
each others hair, we passed the skateboarder twice in one round
and wondered why he didn't look back at us like we looked at him, 
mom and i tried to find shade, she swam through the lily pads, 
my teeth went into your forehead,  my brother had forest camp,
we both loved robin hood, the ski-doo made such waves,
i talked to you as i marched the perimeter, we had come back to each other
but only over the phone, you cried for me, old prayer friend, 
a key lime dress stayed hanging from a branch
for days

AGENDA

i’d be lying if i said the rest of life was not the main agenda item on this docket, let’s do a decision round and delegate some of this so that the parts all have their marching orders, cross that bridge when we come to it and may all your bridges be covered ones, and may you find the love the light the ecology you’ve been longing for by way of not a wagon, but by way of walking in balanced strides that bring vital blood to the  psoas muscles, may you feel the length of your limbs, the information absorbed in the stomping, more gravelly here, hello, harder to roller skate this patch but you’re in boots so don’t get distracted, this is in your wheelhouse (the part of a boat that is a shelter but also one's area of interest), that’s the dream, you walk there just like you’re going to buy eggs or empty someone’s mailbox while they’re out of town, pass the good gardens the good top windows, little framed warmth cathedrals, ebullient askew christmas lights, paper hearts and stars taped to the oily windows, the good life, you’ve tasted it and that’s why you dream of it, habit forming, the hottest water the strongest pressure, let me know you’re here/ let me know i am, sensation, surest bet, well we’re at time, lets wrap up before our closing round, is there anything we have not gotten to, anything lingering? thank you for your patience, I think we got some good work done here today, thanks for bearing with my scatterbrain, we’ll all talk next week and have a chance then to report on the weather, the world, what’s been happening, what’s not sitting right, blurt secrets or show up partial, glitching in and out, i’d be lying if i said i wasn't over ripening and ready, to shut this down, now, and get to it, the rest of life

NIGHTS OF CABIRIA

when Cabiria is in the grass staring beyond the air, or the ending, what did you make of it - when he takes her to the bluff that looks like Peebles and the glow is unbelievable, she thinks he is saving her but then realizes he could kill her, but he can’t and she cries into the dirt, sleeps in a pile, she is a pile, sleeps in the mineral depths of despair, then wakes to walk through the woods to the road where kids are on bikes playing instruments, they loop around her paying no mind oblivious that her heart has been grated/abandoned once more, but she is life spirit a spirit of life not holy or an angel just a creature with electricity, she joins their parade through the trees and her eyes light up, fearful and awake, she reminds me of a friend who i don’t know as much anymore, someone i found when i needed her, we both needed to talk about the same demons who lived in our neighborhood we both needed to forgive someone for not being able to be around, we were easy with each other every flake and lateness forgiven, shrieked regularly at each other’s singular knowing, we were shorter than each other, Cabiria-short in trousers experimenting with hiding or showing, i told her how my tall boyfriend in college told me my other short friend and I how unfair it was, for us to be short and him to be tall, how he’d stand out forever, how we could shimmy through the night, investigate the party without being noticed, but anyone can get swallowed by the bacchanal, anyone can betray,  Cabiria whose eyes grew back to their fullness after the sobbing and the blinks, after picking herself up from the pile, watching the others march towards salvation or euphoria, claiming them possible fools but also tracking their trance and for a moment, merging

SONNET 1

it’s been a month since i sent you the 
crayon-paint-pencil image attempt to capture 
the cafe in Lansingburgh where we ate formal polish dinner
overpriced and empty and so stupid in the early germs of love
before you took me on what i now scowl fondly at as 
your best-of tour, backwoods gas stations soft serve
hot dogs coke in a can on a porch swing 
we scrambled up the green shale canyon even saw 
a naked woman walking like an actual nymph 
decided she must have been ok although in retrospect 
what was she doing feet bare and so many razor shards  
i sent you my artist effort on christmas eve, the training was full
i won’t see you i was waitlisted and still broke
i can’t become a healer  like you, oozing california 
my child bearing years leaving their sweat stain on your 
self actualizing years, you did not respond to the drawing you have
refined your borderlands i saw on venmo u paid your ex to 
ghost write your hinge remember when you schooled me on
hot plastics and frying eggs we lived beneath a burnt out attic
football player wallpaper still peeling off the little boy’s bedroom wall
creepy hallway the heat would go out and you’d caterpillar sleep 
in an explosive goose feather tube i’d sleep on the fold out when i 
hated you it smelled like rust, weird powder in the creases 
but also there were toxic balcony sunsets we loved them 
you’d make me your grandpa’s margaritas
pucker salt you oozing california then too 
i could drink 100 and river gaze
an otter, tugboats, trash drifting by the 
pink orange setting world
oil film like a dirty wish 
on everything trying
to move

THE WORLD CANNOT END

waiting on the cliff, waiting to be lifted 
how a person can dent another person’s 
auto body just by not looking out 
for left turns, still not really their fault -
physics - fathoming all occasions 
as degrees of stretching or truncating time,
another drink, or being re routed
trying to find the restaurant in the first place 
everything ends, the drive, the drink
ice becomes water and it makes 
perfect sense to fear the hot blue light 
resting on the baby chair as you sleep 
imagine you stoic, not able to give 
but also remember the attentive hands, 
pressure searching for ribbons 
picture punctures, rewinds you like
rodent chatter, sparkling gremlin in a rabbit dress
being pushed in a swing in Hoboken, infatuated by
the flat warm wind, 
if god is tapping if the presence of god 
is a lack of god if the tree is a hook 
and if we are trees
if god is never words
dig in the dirt around your house 
and visit the water to look for god 
wait for god listen for god 
if i made a crown from last summer’s 
arugula stalks, if i had gods instead of ghosts
or if my god was a ghost
if i let the sky teach me about change 
if i let impact teach me about truth
finger prints in the bulk aisle
a boy with a name like mine 
yellow and blue kinds of liquid dish soap 
bamboo behind the  mulch pile 
hating someone you love 
loving someone you hate, 
sips and powders
new time unknown time 
my dead uncle's wife dreamt he shook her 
by the shoulders and pointed to the world 
with a worried look
does dreaming of an ending world
help the world to end
he also said that so long as love 
is an ember
the world cannot
end 

INFINITE ROOM

the hydropower of always the universe is full it will never be more or less full all space already at capacity but we are seeing what else can fit, move the boxes around stack them on top of each other try out new under bed storage tactics get the ladder going the garages and closets and under stairway spaces, archival containers, milk crates, hand vacuums while you're at it. people die and inhabit the full space, but they are transparent and liquid, they are clouds and smoke, wind, so they do not take up space they are space and they move without thinking too hard no such thing as haunting just moving where your volume was not expected. we the living concerned and always in this conversation about ways of taking up - the bubbles and zones and borders and domes to preserve and differentiate -  brick pigment silhouette until something bursts the venn diagrams and they unison deflate, a die off, just trash scraps now blending into the rest of what’s being mashed down. whatever makes you go, churning. overlap inevitable, this place crowded but there’s also infinite room? the glasses stack into a tower, the waitress carries the tower, not ashamed to lean the fortress against her chest, her good strong noble ponytail helping with balance, polar pillars, essential grace, she parts the peopled waters until the people strew and go and go and go home and once again the space is sweepable, emptied only in a sense, complete, crowded with sediment and shadow and waiting and now

YOU SAID YOU FELT HOLLOW

unquenchable pod, little bowls little baskets suspended in belief 
waiting to be filled, making lines through the world, 
cross hatch spider webs, the bodies move along the lines as each contains 
a casket bucket, vessels waiting
to catch dropped things 

rope lowering from a rickety platform 
tied to a bucket full of tap water 
to feed imaginary crops 

to be a person in this land, the land is time and static, 
the land is material and alive, the land smells like detergent or minerals 
or rot or putting off or waking up, 

to be contained by a perception/discernment hive 
and to still like to reach through the gauze 
towards other buzzing,

draw five stars, little loop de loop
reminder galaxy above the flame that jumps 
at hollow whistles  

reminder to break from being a statue 
but to also not completely liquify, 
you got this far, you moved the electricity
down from brain terrain to arm
to hand to holding to implement,
which chips away 

keep going in the keep going
once you see you stop going
it’s something else
moving by feel so as to be
felt by
feeling

AUTOPILOT IN BELLEVUE

i go on a journey 
to talk about the center of me 
the Dr wears a bowtie 
and is sexual in an unthreatening way 
we are talking about my organs but he 
addresses my collarbone 
the nurse wears a saint Mary pendant
from Ireland, cartoon elephant tattoos
after the appointment I flee
potential rooting place 
fluorescent and prices jacked 
black tags 19.99
rich person terrain so
much cashmere,
leisurewear across ages 
the good wools the bad statics 
the modern blend uniforms
Lululemon, North Face et al 
in the mirrors I am cinched
the center of me a dial tone 
eyes googly guiding  
steering my vessel and cart 
drape, toss and pay
overcharged and reimbursed 
dialed digit recognized
so the drone fades 
grab chips for familiar coating
mesquite and hand sanitizer 
come back
commemoration

KNIFE SKILLS

a question is a tumbleweed 
and the tumbleweed is a meteor 
approaching at wild speed
but a hand is capable of 
the talk-to-the-hand charade
which might halt the tumbleweed 
turn it into a marble
so an arm can carve
the air in
a sweeping gust  
move it right 
along

THE WORLDS OF THE WORLD

little spirit bugs drawn
to the municipal night sun 
they think the buzzing 
is milk, or stars
and like dominoes
the bats advance 
to feast

you dwell in the bold, 
preoccupied world,
slipping most days 
from any chance to know 
what else 

but they all move, 
the worlds of the world 

heaving for beauty and endlessness 
no matter the matrix
of crawlway partitions
that scramble and scream 
for close-goodness
but stay stubbornly apart,
splinters of a trunk
that won’t return

and curse the woman who stays put
in the middle of the road
it's so inconvenient 
to swerve 

but what earthly need must keep her 
there, and what is yours –

to drive in one
straight line? 

one avoids her body, 
but also her request
as all you know is easy
to mistake for all there is to know 
filling  echo with chatter
and darkness with 
searchlights --  

simulating sun, 
or the rush of devotion,

pulsing wristbands
bringing blood
to the stadium's
heart

A WHOLE DAY NOT NAILED TO ITSELF

like a floating tissue covered in variants
traveling towards innocent parties,
driving the mazes in the the cracked car
wind whistles through
every encounter an intersection and 
therefore a crucifix so you must
choose, again, lateral or liminal
or threadbare stretched taut between tacks,  
how will you absorb
the thickness of time?

BROKE

i just went shopping for elite food 
knowing i’m more broke than i’ve been 
in a long time, knowing it’s because 
of health and also help
i lent you money to fix you car so you could work
i was less broke and less broken than you
so i took you out for hot broths all winter long
and you don’t like to split the check, 
say it’s not romantic,
and you’re right, but neither is being broke,
not actually, so i’d like us both to stop
but i’d also like us both to stop
having jobs

ANNE

i remember Anne’s little apartment by the UN,

and a cat named Mao

i would get dropped there for an afternoon

we’d eat rice in bowls on the futon

surrounded by stacks of colored books, 

she would tell me about growing up with my dad and his brothers, 

how magic she thought they were when she met them,

i remember worrying that she was lonely, and wondering, 

maybe asking, where everyone was, her family? 

feeling her special love for me, but also fearing her life, could it be mine? 

like my best friend’s daughter when she comes to my apartment

for the afternoon, freckle face scrunched, is this where you live? 

with nobody else? do you have kiddos? why not?

you’ve never made anything? 

she holds her belly with one hand,  princess doll with the other

across my life Anne has given me gifts, buys me meals, 

like 6 years ago when we had fancy lunch in Rhinebeck, 

soup in a shallow bowls with crisped garnish,

my tears falling into the warm napkin as she inquired into

a softer, scarier realm, despite my efforts to deliver

my angry heart's play-by-play,

she ordered me tea and said something basic but astute

about beingawomanbeingthirty, what the symbols begin 

to mean, the claustrophobic architecture they erect, 

which landed like a cool hand to my fluttering pulse,

the place where head and neck meet, so hot with

dread of regret, her words and look the quietest

soothing secret, even if their story is a blasted one,

and i wondered then, had she actually been lonely, 

then or before, and was I, even? there with the soup? 

or here now, in my childless realm of treasures and time? 

when i was small I thought Anne was magic,

and as we grew her magic did too, both of our lives exhaling outside

the lines of any plan, and from her change she spoke to me across

the table's threshold, told me about when my grandma took her out to lunch 

in Manhattan, white tablecloths and wine, two women a generation apart 

named Anne, motherless in different ways, only-children raised in the city, 

how my grandma told 30 year old Anne about the sorrow of growing old,

though only in her 60s and with a new lover and 4 grown sons,

how mother grandmother Anne looked at childless Anne and said:

well i guess now i just wait to die! 

and they both stared frozen, then laughed, 

couldn't stop, two women,  

two wild kind chestnut haired girls

grown and growing,

looking at each other across

the dissolving, unblocked

space of it all

FROM THE CAPSULE

the drain rain tells the corners
about night

chime echo at the end of the bed
coral colored cloth limp on the floor
bathroom heater and digital clock
aggressive facts 

i smash my body around
turning/ tuning out totality
wondering who,
and when

the moon doesn't reach the capsule
but the the humidifier light does change
from green to red.

no babies here. no old people.
no animals. 

nothing in the oven,
despite the room
how it could only fit
a waiting person

BRAIN/ GREEN/ HAND/ HAIR/ HEART/ WATER

BRAIN
Woman on the train  selling needles, knives, salami and binoculars.
The novel will combine spirals of doubt with photos of curtains and walls.
The narrator sits in parks alone and eats  pastries that leak oil through the paper
they are wrapped in. The clicking of a cane. Zdravete to the bench men.
Giving coins to women dozing.  Special tea, honey, peppers, fig jam, platform shoes,
nice pencils, underwear, hair clips, rakia, ouzo, the board game “Gender Wars”,
figs, plums, nuts, honey, cheese, stuffed peppers, mish mash,
hot dogs with white/yellow cheese, shopska, gratin.
Working women (maids?) ask working men (chauffeurs?)
from the same (hotel?) for lights in the park on a (cigarette?) break. 
The last almond. the lonely party animal. Wide eyes, pursed lips.
Can of coffee and Adidas. More men sleeping. Me with a man as my guide.
Keep the knowledge of pairs, the looming face, the landscape, what happens.
Turns out there’s lots more I won’t admit I don’t know.
Dials and wheels.

GREEN  

Green drink giving me strength, you’re the psycho killer.

Girls crying on headphones, crates of leafy green. A risk, but nerve power,

he's already “under the table”, so no problem, circling me with his warm

sweater arm, nudging, slamming glasses and hollering, ordering photos –

get the dj, get the dancing girls, takes my hands to dance, green pink white crystal

pin-points of light, I'm wearing 6 shirts and smell like nothing good,

the village cold, the silent streets, 2 old freaks making out

in the teenage territories.

HAND 

At the house of Milko and Velli a walnut tree, two chairs separated by a table

covered in cloth and lined up jars of food Velli is canning for winter. Lunch is ready:

Moussaka, bread, yogurt, cucumber – like Krastev. Little plastic cup crème brûlée pudding,

plums and grapes. At the train station Milko extends his hand then takes us to the view. 

HAIR

Dripping braid, floor sediment in the rental behind banitza factory, massive rain,

the dip that cradles the birthmark. Pink skin red hair. Orange hair, red face. Laundry running,

egg boiling, instant coffee, hair drying. Chocolate mouth, advanced herbal soap shampoo.

HEART 

To bar and to drink but then wetness, trying to explain. Blue American purgatory.

Confessions of an aching spy. Every night at 2:30 am

he reaches across the canyon to tell me no.  

WATER 

Tall joyful movie star girls, waterfall hair, dancing faster 

than music. Bottle to prop the train window, fields of black dry sunflowers, 

fried fish, snow white Croatia salad, same song, man watching tv, girl who cut her leg

and wants to play without jumping, boy who is good at math whose mother wants him

to say “what’s your name”, haz se kazvash en angliski, 

I am americanski and we are doing a proyect

sharing money, sharing water, when we are close I want

to be closer, chugging from

a green bottle in a green place

girls helping each other look good 

in the bathroom, laugh-nodding 

dobre, dobre, 

da.

NO POEMS

i woke up with poems but 
promptly turned to other things 
that scratch, trying to get
to the power beverage 
before it cools

all titles, no poems

JESSE IN CALIFORNIA
GIFTS I GIVE MYSELF
MY BLOOD
THE STAIRS BY YOUR HOUSE
WHAT I DON’T WANT
BEING ERASED
SIS
YEAR OF DRUGS
THE DRAGON CLOUD

in the book the demons write 
friendly letters
advising each other on their
human clients
the most successful method is
to turn the clients back towards
themselves, keep the seekers seeking
instead of closing in
on God

MEGHAN/ THE MULCH
HEART LIKE A RAKE
DREAM GIRLS ON THE ROAD
ALIEN ENCOUNTER
FRIEND(LY)

my landlords are gone so I abandon
a scent-sensitive lifestyle, 
ylang ylang discount candle 
and rosemary that almost catches 
the place on fire

place and palace being a 
typo apart 

and through the smudges there’s 
white gold sun behind the steam 
and a wet world outside
and  shopping lists fading
to see-through

EVIL

a soiled fleece in the ferns
a smudged out horizon
fire leaves in a fire sky
last gasps of life muted by 
actual gasping   
we seal up our homes
bring the rain and the ocean 
underground
smoke air moves 
through smoke places
energy cancels energy
rabbits and crows skirt the human gulf
intolerable if not broken down
crumbs too minuscule 
to snack on
squishy shoes pace 
parched lands
don’t want those worlds 
to touch

PERFECT LOVERS

my perfect lover is behind me
not their body, but in time 
not in regret, but in dimension 
like me now, changed, but then,
treading in the innocence of not
knowing, or needing, to change 
each lover a dried bean or fruit
or fungus, awaiting rehydration
my perfect lover is lucky walking down
the block, I have extra bread in my bag
to share, shy bites beneath the archway
summer sunsets but the vines stay stocked,
the neighbors abandon their guilt 
as the black grapes keep growing --
perfect lovers being friends, yes
and songs having been written about their
actually simple contracts, 
beautiful by al green, good woman by cat power
let’s make a deal to croon, to be good,
to be old, to demand each other be
each other, both now and in
the future when
we’ve all
lost track