Kai

For a time Kai sat in laps
and watched his father
make spreadsheets.

Now that he goes to preschool
Kai takes attendance at home.
Lines are crooked. Stakes are high.

Kai does make things harder
when we go bowling
and every dancing pin reads

Kai
Kai
Kai

Whose turn is it, Kai?
Will they make it to the lane
in time?

Run

Aching muscles,
sore feet,
crackling knees,
sandpaper lungs.

Bite marks.

Turns out,
I can't outrun a horde of zombies.

Gowanus

There once was a man from Gowanus

whose favorite dish was cow anus.

     He'd braise it in wine

     till it tasted quite fine.

That silly gourmet from Gowanus.

It's at night - when you're
just about to fall asleep - that your
unbounded brain starts to write
out your grocery list and wonder
if he is really mad at you or just trying to
make you feel guilty and, suddenly,
you know the solution to the
debt crisis in Greece and the exact
way you want to rearrange that
top-left cabinet and, wait, why
do we shape our eyebrows for
aesthetic pleasure, isn't that weird?,
and could there actually be a meaning
behind all the the seemingly random
ways we come together and fray apart and
come together and fray apart and repeat
and repeat and repeat?

Then it's morning.
And all you think is -
I have to pee.

Light

You may watch me
when I'm gone.
I wouldn't mind.

You could watch me
in my sleep now
and I'd sleep just as sound.

Put new words in my mouth
if it pleases you.
That's why I put them there too.

I think I'd like
to be made of light
and remind you, you are not.

Brining

It's a slow process

Water pressure

welling against tissue.

The salt burrows into muscle and fat,

clawing through tissues,

breaking down proteins, cell

by cell.

Pressure welling against tissue.

Saturated

Pressure welling against tissues,

forcing expansion in muscle and fat.

Breaking down,

cell

by cell

until the meat

is

changed.

Denatured

And constantly, the relentless pressure

Don't try to hold it in

Don't try to hold it in

Sitting

You sing him to sleep
pretend he is yours
kiss his head
watch him sleep
feel like crying.
It is so easy
to take him in your arms 
to pretend.

He changes every day.
He’ll soon be crawling 

away from you.
He won’t need you
to carry him around
to prop him on the wooden dresser
so he can giggle
staring at the sight of himself in the mirror.

My Hipster Temptation

when you lean like that, 

all odd angles against brick,

laughing into my hair smoky and 

liquid and low—

i want to do it over again.

i want to drive into this

until we run out of road.

Pussy cat

I came back from the pharmacy
to find 317 open tabs
open on the browser
of my open laptop.

My poor cat.
She still failed
to find kitty porn.

Super Lazy

I never wish

for super powers more

than when I'm standing

at the foot of a staircase

thinking about teleportation.

Nesting

I do not like your machinations
For my posters.
Frames are for rich people and criminals.

In the dead of night I will hang
Construction paper chains from the chandeliers
And strange Ikea lights in the windows.

I will not hide a single shelf of books.
Not even my reasonably-sized Anne Geddes collection.

The knick-knacks are bursting with charm:
The Barbra Streisand doll looks out over
A Civil War soldier girl one eye who grins
Dumbly at a poster of dogs in smart hats
That make me giggle.

You may try for "refined," but
I hate to edit the life out of things.
Here's to a happy medium
(Porcelain, peering into a paper weight on my desk).

For Tupac

When I'm gone,

don't cry for me.

Just boot up our

favorite memory.

Haircut

After you'd gone, I
sweeping up, days
later, finding dark half
moons on the floor.

Howler

The howler monkey may be
The loudest animal
In the new world

But it is not the loudest
In my apartment building.

Simple Songs

Sometimes I wish I was

a little bit taller, and

I wish I was a baller,

but then I remember,

I'm sexy and I know it.

Lot

These are the lucky numbers for the Victorian lotto—
Thirty-Six, Twenty-Four, Thirty-Eight.
Your love for me is bound
between eighteen and twenty-four inches,
running down the length of all twenty-four
of my ribs. Maybe if God or the husband or
Her Majesty—whoever rules my trunk today—
would remove the twenty-fourth, I could breathe
enough to tell you this. Give my rib some fertile lay
of earth, bury it, and let it sprout
into a third sex with perfect proportions,
a sex who’ll never sweat with wheezing dreams
of what she’s not.
We walk wasp-waisted, wrapped
in whale bone, hugged to death by another thing’s
skeleton. Women of bound feet and stretched neck,
why do we love to twist ourselves into impossible states?
As if one pause, stopping at the edge for one, deep breath,
will wake us up to where we’ve come.

I resemble the hourglass that never empties,
while estrogen slips from one bulb to the next
through the tight cervix of the waist.
Always I will be the handled bearer
of your generations, always I will seem
the impossible woman sawed-in-two
while your hands trace the outline
and your lips move with the victorious dimensions:
Thirty-Six, Twenty-Four, Thirty-Eight.
Jackpot.

The Mind [according to Montaigne]

is like a horse that has broke
from his rider, who voluntarily runs
into a much more violent career than any
horseman would put him to, and creates me
so many chimaeras and fantastic monsters,
one upon another,
without order or design, that,
the better at leisure to contemplate their strangeness
and absurdity, I have begun to commit them
to writing, hoping in time
to make it ashamed of itself.

Fingers must learn rules

If you write it screaming
you can't take it back. Retype
it, calm and reasonable.

Choose your brackets wisely
to maintain the order of operations.

Control and command do nothing
alone. Another stroke calls the action.

Unless it is all frozen,
escape may save you in a corner.

You have the power to shift, to be less
than a comma, more than a period.

The zero is twice
as large as any number.

There are four directions.
Choose wisely.

Nerves

Sometimes I get so jittery,

I worry that I will start vibrating

fast enough to just

disappear.

Stella, Tobias, and Snausage

I dont know where to stand
At parties. Too near
My companion and I finish
Every other story, start
Few of my own, too far
From her and I can't find
An opening to speak at all.
I am forever underfoot.
Lord help us if things get political.

Today I gave up.
Broke away from the two
Conversations loosely reigning
My efforts at sociability
To roll in the grass with the dogs.
I always know the right thing
To say to a dog.

For Taylor

I was drunk,
then hungover,
then I had an
iced coffee.

Now I'm okay.