May 16 Seattle

I am at my most    creaturely    today    an ugliness

you can really feel    tear-stained    nipple-bruised

and sort of sleepy.        Nighttime dream-sex

with bus-strangers    has left me    daytime sad.

The bed knows    you are coming home    but

my body doesn’t.        When you    are away

I am a bad person    badder    every day.

I don’t know    what to do    with all this

grief.        Put it in a poem    I guess.

May 18 Seattle

These are dark days   Aedes aegypti

carrying off whole babies    almost-men

leading girls    like startled deer    out

of the dark cool    of the arboretum.

Of course    I am kidding    but the world

is ending    and then there is nothing

I want    to do    anyway.        Poems,

who cares.        We all exude a fine    silvery

fear    a snail’s track    on the morning hearth.

Neil deGrasse Tyson    Ian Edward Furst    little

swooping bats    in the slow spring deepening

oh you wonderful things    keeping me    alive

September 29 Seattle

Wine    I’m weightless    in the wet    neon    night.

Smell of burning plastic    wood smoke    leather sleeves.

I can’t leave you    without imagining    your death.

I burn    the inside of your palms    with my brains.

October 1 Seattle

The morning is an ocean    dark and cold

gentle rotting things   lap against my waist

I think I’m dead    in the wavering phosphorescence.

What kind of city   stains its sky    this color

what kind of city    lets spiders    get this big.

I drink so much    I drown my heart    under the porch

under the child’s rocking chair    with the peeling stickers

I’m going    to break open    I’m going    to break open

o beauty    the sun turns red    and the earth    turns grey.

January 3 Seattle

Imagine    having a feeling    you choose

for yourself.        This is    my    body.

I am going    to burn    it down.        It’s grey

when I    remember    what happened

it’s red    when I lay down    with my thoughts.

A woman is the saddest thing    I have ever been.

Whose body    is    this body.

You don’t know how hard    it is

to speak   like this    to speak    poem.

I feel    nothing    it feels    terrible.

I am pulling this    out of my heart    by the root