There’s a phrase for it, the way / I’m lately loving like a river / is pressed to my door

my hair sways long / black streams cascade / down my back / somewhere, skies illuminate after somber rain

It is unseemly to blow your nose into a tablecloth. If you share a / bed with another man, keep still. If you pass a person pissing, do /not greet him.

It came from a catalogue. I opened / the plastic bag inside the plastic bag / and out tumbled fabric fine as flesh.

The chalk taste of prescription pill / washed down / with too-sweet lemonade. I only take it / because you do, and I wonder / if you get high so you can tolerate me.

O bobolink. The bobolink is dead / at my door — found leaving my apartment / to school then to work. After some searching, / I guess it’s a bobolink—this lemon- / headed crow, this crumpled parachute cloth.

We come from the mountains, we have wolf / in our blood, we have pinebarb.

Make it out to my sense of melodrama or maybe just my consistent need for I think it’s called attention?

& so I hear / in the beginning I am not / 12 & I hear hips swinging a wide bridge / a chorus swelling in the bass / of my chest & I break

I fall into the mountain side; I burn in / to the twisting serpent of chambers / hidden there. I am wild for the underlength / of tunnels and beautiful men who run like blood.

Give me that handkerchief someone dropped on the corner next to the stand / where those suits are trying to swap sunlight for twenty buckets of swampland

Behind some airport some quiet organ -ization ignites a portable flare stack. Cindy, whose depression is tropical, is not yet a hurricane.

I should study knife skills / or fish deboning. Have you / ever held fresh, dead chicken?

Long after mother had said / “goodbye” to her piano, / Dad — dead drunk, / broke her mandolin.

So #MeToo cuts her ponytail off, walks into a bar and takes a seat next to #MeToo and the bartender serves #MeToo whiskey from an eyedropper