How to Build a Thirst Trap

Refill your prescriptions on time. Trade in your quilted blanket for a pair of heels. Trip down a flight of stairs. Drink Cabernet Sauvignon straight from the bottle. Never wake up before your alarm. Wear your hair long. Wear your hair short. Shave off all your hair and learn how to play poker. Buy a bra that makes your tits look like Daytona Beach in the spring. Forget you bought the bra. Breed dinosaurs so you have a reason to hold hands and run through a forest with Jeff Goldblum. Go to Starbucks and spill coffee on every man peppered in salt. Touch their wrists. Look each of them in the eye and say, Oh, my my. Go to bed with rug-burned knees. Keep your phone charged. Briefly date a man who speaks in semicolons and traces rollercoasters down your spine. Make out on a park bench seventeen minutes before the start of fall. Buy a removable shower head. Buy a yoga mat. Drink eight glasses of water every day. Stop lying to your psychiatrist and actually take the prescriptions you refilled on time. Replace your shoulder blades with a pair of wings. Fly directly into the sun. 

It Is Evergreen to Say the Word Evergreen

There was light, the fake kind, the kind that always looks like it just chipped a tooth. There was a cigarette, maybe two, though it’s hard to count when your heart beats in multiples of hummingbird. I can’t figure out how much of my heart is fiction, but you haven’t tasted depressed in weeks, so I’m not worried about the spider climbing across the bedroom ceiling. Nine years later I watch you get dressed for tomorrow two hours early. Our bodies, older than we both remember—softer, achingly quiet, loose buttons on a flannel—though the sheets still smell the same, and the sweat on your neck is still my favorite drink to order at the bar. Nine years later and I am drawn back to the weather of ache. What they don’t teach you in college is that every house is haunted if someone fell in love in it. I could walk through a wall but where would I go? It is hard to say goodbye to what was already a goodbye. It took too long for me to learn that if you pour a beer into the ocean, it will become the ocean. When was the last time the moon was given a bath? My left hand is drunk. I wish magic was cheaper. Still, I am covered in clouds. Come see. 

It really is. It’s mountains. The tips of God’s fingers.

I don’t know what’s lonelier: the lack of skin 

in my throat or how I keep googling bulletproof backpacks 

or how, after three decades, my sister’s grave still hasn’t grown 

larger than a shoebox. 

Saturdays Are for Shaky Hips

I’ve never come home from war, but I’ve walked through a cornfield in November. In college, I bought a toaster because I was always losing my lighter. I don’t like sunflower seeds, but I like the way Fox Mulder moves his lips whenever he has a reason to move his lips. Every Saturday afternoon my husband turns my orgasm up to eleven. I tell my therapist, It’s easy to fall in love with anything after a mid-morning moan. What I’m trying to say is it’s always the third margarita that brings the quietest sip.

The First Line of This Poem Could Be Its Own Poem

Outside, man-made thunder above us, we sit on a picnic table we found using a treasure map that was scratched into the bark of a tree, faded like the initials of lost lovers, as we share a bottle of Pinot Grigio that’s lightly sweating from the lips. You take a pack of blue American Spirits out of your pocket. You light my cigarette with the heat between my thighs. You take a drag and stare at what sits on your head. The sun, you say, I like it on my face. Studies show they are studies. Nine out of ten dentists recommend brushing your heart twice a decade. My psychiatrist’s psychiatrist’s cousin—a guy who knows a guy who’s a heart surgeon in Des Moines—recommends waiting forty-five minutes after growing wings before drowning in a lake. The sun, you say, looks like it’s kissing itself. Somewhere a willow sways. I tell every forest you will always be my favorite tree. The bottle of wine on the picnic table is empty, though it's still sweating. You use your cigarette to light mine. Nine out of ten pediatricians agree that cigarettes taste better when you smoke them. Back home, we eat buttered noodles in bed. I can hold my breath through seven ellipses, you say. I tell you, I love the way you say wow even in the wintertime. Across the street, the sign outside a hardware store reads We sell hammers by the pound. My favorite part of drugs are the side effects. I can smell track thirteen of Doolittle on your wrists. I keep forgetting to ask the moon what it’s always running away from. When I find out, I will have found out.