eternal return
after the train derailment, the sunsets lasted twice as long. my uncle defeated the purpose of his bunker by overdosing before the war could start. before chimneys, chimney swifts were just swifts. the key to reading this poem is to imagine yourself extinct. i drove past the same house everyday until it burned down. after my dealer got arrested, switchgrass grew around his car like the bones of a hundred lizard tails. when i bit the wafer, the wrong body flooded into me. clouds banked like clouds. i didn't understand how they could fit a river in the atmosphere. the medical bills came postscripted with inspirational stories about kids with cancer. every morning, crows by the bus stop pretended to be an omen.
all three of the gift shops at guantanamo bay sell castro bobbleheads
in the basement, we stripped phosphorus from match-strikes with nail files. bring the war home. punch your neighbor. when the bellringer left his post outside the kroger we took the change in his bucket and distributed cans of mace throughout the neighborhood. dusk fell over the reservoir's scald of water like a hood on a detainee. if i was more important FBI informants would be reading this poem. the advantage of being low-income was that less of my taxes went to bombing civilians. in the highway median, coral mushrooms blossomed out of a paper bag. the geese all flocked in the wrong direction. after the dillard’s closed, two competing naval recruitment centers set up shop. outside the hospital, snow fell from a chemical plant.
the insurgency turned the used car lot into a staging ground
desire paths ran the lawn like hesitation marks. my doctor, holding a tongue depressor like a shiv, told me his crocuses came up six months early. 300 feet above us, tourists in a hot air balloon photographed an unmarked graveyard. at the bonfire i burned my medical bills and watched the smoke roil into a broken arm. after the armistice day parade, a city employee swept electric candles into a garbage compactor. before folding the sheets back into the bed, my ex left their set of keys on the armoire. if history is the history of class struggle then why'd my landlord leave me a pan of brownies. on the radio they were sure we'd still win the war. it was only by the grace of god that i got out of the closeout sale for pitchforks unscathed. as the anthem played we all laid down like lenin at his funeral. when we squinted, we could still see flowers rising from the scorched earth.
the problem with constructing a moral calculus is that most of us start in the red
after Kendrick Lamar’s “Untitled 05”
i opened the icebox, fished a pocket knife out of the tub of lard, and went off looking for the guy who owed me money. the heat wave’d burned itself out but the sky still smelled like piss, fields bleached for 40 acres on either side of the road. at the river crossing all the rats scrambled up the bilge of a coalship. that there were 42,951 structurally deficient bridges in the united states when i wrote this poem is relevant only insofar as i used it to externalize my fear. anyway, the guy'd stiffed me for a bottle of unisom that i'd said was vikes. i'd given him the month out to get me right and a season went by so there i was, idling outside the gas station where he clerked. went inside and his kid was on the counter, babbling like he was reading a tablet pulled out of a ruined temple so i bought a pack of mike & ikes and left. the road cut through the mountain like someone's dream of a straight line. i thought of my uncle, drinking in a field with a holy roller he’d lured off the doorstep before starting the ignition and driving his ford taurus into someone’s kitchen. holy roller died, uncle survived, and i spent five years in catholic school. deer crowded the guardrail like angels caught in the glow of a shotgun blast. i stopped at the dam. a loon skittered across the lake like a tallboy on a freeway. i threw my knife in and watched water crest over the embankment.
letter to former lover
googled your name again to see if you're still alive. i’ve moved states twice but the bullet hole always ends up back in the front door. when a balloon popped next to the produce aisle i hit the floor, grapes spilling all around me like pearls snatched off a neck. give 'em enough time and most improbable things will happen; i was driving to joe's to give him the drugs when i saw our toddler wandering down the road, followed by a pride of lambs all named after you. after i smashed your lamp i blamed it on my unhappy childhood, to which you blamed your not having sympathy for my unhappy childhood on your unhappy childhood. late violets were blooming under the windowsill. on the ride back from the inpatient program you told me when you try to make all of suffering a metaphor it stops communicating anything. it takes more than martyrdom for most people to get remembered. in another timeline we're standing in the ruined city, only the city isn't ruined anymore. i've got the kid and you're holding a parasol, all of us watching a monkey dancing on top of a music box, the monkey watching the sea rise like a runaway loaf of sourdough. always easier to imagine life as better than it is, i suppose. your shadow's still roaming the apartment, rounding corners, filling mirrors. i turn around and there you are, wan in the refrigerator's light. our toddler's by the window, staring at us as they push over a table full of teacups.
february, unseasonably warm with rain
streams in their originary culverts pulled coliform bacteria into the reservoir. i was sick with something i couldn't name. headlights cut through rain like moses parting the crowd at a methadone clinic. all sorts of things i could tell you. when i walked past the war memorial all the bloodroot turned their cocked ears. spotted salamanders made their yearly suicidal migration across rio road. someone told me the dope was bad. in the graveyard, i watched the marble-hewn names in their invisible dissolution. ivy swallowed the house they carried the woman out of. in my driveway, a man lay with his mouth open. vernal pools stocked themselves with woodfrogs. the landscape translated only roughly into the eulogistic mode. at dusk, their chorus like the crackling of distant fires.
for elizabeth, at the start of the end of the world
money fled the neighborhood
like a swallowtail let out of a bear trap.
as we walked under the bridge
two river logs startled an arrow
of crows into traffic. new heat
hung over the county like a skin
on raw milk. always hard to analogize
a vanishing future— a precocious child
becoming a cartoon ghost, 20% of
the atlantic's plankton dissolving
as i lay my hand across your shoulder.
there is no interesting way to write
that, 50 years ago, a handful
of company executives decided
to suppress research that suggested
fossil fuel extraction might end civilization,
so i write the rim of the sunset darkened
above us like a cloud of passenger pigeons
above the lethe as a stray paws
for the field mice that live under my porch.
you said i can't tell if what's missing
is what’s lost or the idea of it
having been here. we both imagined
the apartment blocks on either side of us
collapsing into the hum of imported insects.
a snowy egret's plume lifted over the bosk,
hemmed at city's edge by the highway,
as a beaver sideled through
tangled reed and mallow. the stream
made a bend in the crook of your elbow,
phosphates in a sheen over smoothed shale,
none of us growing old.