“Because the day I fucked you I caught an infection and now I have it for life.”

Words reach out of my mind for paradise. And come back with rocks.

One night, I wake and Daddy’s in the bathroom with a hanger in his mouth.

Lover’s leap to a bank of smooth shale/ Where I sat drinking beer that past summer/watching a group of hard shell Baptists/line up to be saved in it’s muddy waters

I believe in scouring the sea with spears

was only a small enough matter of time before you started to show up as new words like soft pink clues dropped inside tiny fingernail teacups to find their innermost meaning, then wishes, floating up near the top like…

I'm the first child she ever knew that couldn't sing.

Lela, my grandmother.

Daylight and cold sensed as an abstract, a number in my mind. Air thin, polluted, lacking oxygen. But the Recyclers are at it again.

When the lore of the land could no longer hold the minds of men, they turned their eyes to places where they expected to find no other gaze.

The carnival passed through this hotel one time only, its boarded guests pretending to ignore the smell of outdoor whore in their bedding.

She told me it had been there since she was a kid, this large black spot like a blimp floating from her right arm up to the tip of her neck. She had really pale skin so she kinda looked like a cow strutting down the street.

At night, we’d sleep in our usual spots on the edge of the bed - Becca on the left, me on the right with Hanna in the middle as before the accident.

Listening too much to the night, with its whistles, bright lights of luminescent bursts like leaves on fire, or the raised ear of a cow in the purple mist, or the curled tail of a pig foraging in the night.

She lived a good life she told herself. She lived a good life because she demanded little- little materialistic comforts that is- at least this is what she thought- and what she demanded anyway was simple, aesthetic; sophisticated and perhaps even neat. Yes she was a neat…