When you greeted each other / your palms / like embers in cigarette stubs / red and hot / showed from your sleeves

He never finished a performance without making a prediction. His predictions, if right, would immediately boost his prestige and reverence so much so that when he passed his offering bowl around afterwards people would be more than willing to part with their hard-earned cash.

Elsewhere, some later year, I’ll try to be good. Today I don’t care.

As they headed back into town in Smiley’s pickup, she could only feel like they had all done something wrong, something to be ashamed of. Something they could never talk about again.

"I've always been interested in the invisible poem. When a poem is finished, what is the undercurrent? What is it still trying to say?"

I learned to sleep as light as a new mother, in increments of minutes rather than hours, listening as I dreamed for a rustling of clothing, a knife unsheathed, and then I stopped sleeping altogether.

excuse me this chambray tie / this cummerbund, these plain chops, / these dull lips. I’ve no guilt for gild's sake.

I love expectation // beauty subsumed

my mother leaning in listening / her usual face her yesterday’s face / out cold on the couch

As a witness should I run to her? Make sure she's not suffering a stroke or an aneurysm? I pictured a headline demanding the whereabouts of a witness who'd left the scene of a potential homicide.

blame grows small in the moth’s circling / day to day the slightest tooth loosens / a landscape changes until returning by habit

It's easy in the sense that all you have to do is get in the car and fire up the app. It's hard in that it requires long, monotonous hours to be fruitful, and constant vigilance to stay safe. San Francisco is a tough city to drive.

If I had known all boats eventually yield / to the current, I would have readied myself / long ago

You have found out that someone dies every two seconds. This shouldn’t make you feel better, but it does.

We think that Tinder is just for fun, swiping like in a videogame, like the 1980s game Frogger where the frog hops across the freeway and tries to avoid getting flattened by cars—this is how we feel about dating.

Why hide? To be found. Why be found?

By recreating the past, I do not mean going back in a sentimental nostalgic way, but by rebellion and opposition to a world in which we see more and more borders, and walls.

Why did he shape my brother’s body to the contours of war? Is this the shape of all our language already?

You return, at last. / At the edge no longer./ At the margin’s curve no longer. / Circular no longer. / In the embers of unfading foam. / The sputum of inscrutable lava.

I am at my threshold. / The dirt of our daughter. / The mole of her squirming body.

The other day I received my first offer for term life insurance (how are corporations so prescient?), which has the effect of reminding a man he’s going to die, just as a baby has the effect of reminding a man that if he dies, it shouldn’t be for nothing.

SAFE Employees make a SAFE railroad. With SAFE employees, a railroad devoid of any mechanical safety devices CAN and WILL be operated safely.

It’s not the contraption itself that I love—this pair of shells of steel and lace—but the woman who measures me and tests my straps as if armoring me for battle.

I'd never felt so sad engraving a trophy before, like I wanted to throw it away when I was done with it.

Bars or no bars, if you did have something worth having, they’d take it, whether you were ridiculous about home security or not.

She understands the place she was born into is full of shadows. They slip into her open cracks, slide oozing into the gutters of her ribs, spill against the long, unbroken lines of her legs.

We're not here yet, and still the key aches in the lock. I am leaving, and it's as if I was returning

Before I am beautiful I'm in the hairdresser’s chair, / perched atop two phone books, holding my ear. My reflection / in the bathroom mirror is a landscape painting.

Do me a favor, brother, / what's all this about / summoning Death / for each / person to bear?

A cupboard is just asking to be opened. A cupboard doesn’t ask a question, but is, by its very nature, an entreaty. A cupboard says it did not ask to be a cupboard, did not ask to be an entreaty, is not, in fact, a cupboard at all.

I know how my friend must have privately felt / on the cusp of his final adventure, watching / the cars on the highways around downtown Dundas / get smaller

to bury a Black body / not out of respect for life / but to prevent disease // and cut the stench / and if a cross is laid on / the mound of dirt