Doing Everything Right

Questions to ask yourself before you use a time machine

Five Desires

in my hands, the inverted bottle is a head,
newly drowned, trying to suck air faster

than the liquid can be expelled.
it jerks and shudders like it’s weeping
 
or vomiting into my pea green sink.

On Leaving a Gallon of Milk Out for Six Hours

My Trans Body as a Spanish Giboso

...I found this moss
for you it is soft you are soft I am
green inside there are stars
in the moss...

Star Moss

"Your body teems with birds flying north.
It’s summertime in the valley
of your mouth..."

On Breezy Days When the Veil Seems Thinner

Sometimes I am both
the cow and the fire, strangely yoked.
My fat drips, my heat licks,
and the congregation feasts

Three Things I Learned in Church

As he peered through hexagonal cells
within the hivestack he devised,
watching embryonic queens swirl in royal jelly—

What Dzierzon Saw

Together we’ve gathered them, these sheaves,
like pages from Nag Hammadi’s codices,
piling them, raking the scattered reams
of dusty, crumpled, nut-brown oak leaves.

Leaf Burning

The nature of things:
light licks grass, bugs crawl and sing,
I devour and am consumed in return.

The Prairie

That night I dream that rather than tubes, I am made of marble. I dream that I have a knife that slides right through. I dream that in the morning, she awakens to find two stone breasts bleeding on the hood of her Lexus.

Becoming Civitavecchia's Bleeding Statue

I look at you the way two locusts stare
at each other with flat hunger and know
the emptiness tearing at the other’s throat.

Flamegold and Honey Locust

Autumn slipped his hand around my throat
but it was already severed and spilling
cut up words across his IKEA carpet.

Abecedarian

"here no one knows you here
there are night birds"

Patio Furniture in a Mid-April Cold Snap

"I think of his paintings,
300 of them stacked
in his Cold War-era fallout shelter"

Driving with Grandpa

"we held
not only the frogs, but that whole pond; touched
not just their bellies, but the slick thin skin of evolution,
grown polliwogs—squirming fraternity in the water."

Reflection on Blackwater Pond

"They caressed their rubies and guzzled their beers
while we hatched a plan. I stood outside the window and we stacked
on me the dog, on him the cat, on her the cock, feet on back."

The Bremen Town Musicians

"to be pressed down
by icy, godly hands; to join Belonging.
O smooth me to perfection, Lord, and crown
my head with snow."

The Field Is White

With the greatest invention of mankind accessible in my pocket, I never have to remember anything ever again. I’ve replaced my (What is the part of the brain that remembers things?) hippocampus with a search engine.

Rook Rainsdowne

Selected work