indulgences

watching tv, my roommate says she doesn’t believe
in fibromyalgia. “well i don’t believe in karma,”
i tell her, “or helen keller.” we mute the next few
commercials.

Unspeakable Fun

If I can't say blank, blank, and blank

how long will it take for you to say

Walter Cronkite? Oops, your point.

At least that buzzer's broken. 

eight poems from wine wednesday poetry battle

amanda and i had a poetry battle with the aid of a bottle of second-try yellowtail. words were chosen at random by moderators b. grossman and s. holt from "twinkie, deconstructed," a nonfiction text by steve ettlinger. these words then became titles of three-line poems we had roughly one minute to write. here are manda's. here are mine.

tremendous
my stegosaurus ate your stegosaurus
then ate your grandmother
and coughed up her nightgown

powders
she knew her fair share of toilet bowl rims
splatterpainted in earth shades
and the tiny icon chillingly akin to a swastika

vanilla
burnished bottle of venom sting
juggle blades wait
too much salt

antiseptic
once i waited too long to cut the papaya
it was teeming with tumors, tar-filled potholes
stuck in my teeth like voodoo amoebae

gums
the only thing weirder than toenails
are the chiclet-bones above the tongue
and the way, in their absence, your mouth caves in like a pirate's

indescribably fluffy
today i shook hands with halitosis
he wore a mohair sweater bummed off a cadaver
and a thorned crown of expired gefiltefish fins

a familiar and tasty raw material-- milk
a baby snake does not suckle
only slithers away to swallow a gerbil whole:
poor centipede, poor mammary-glandless frog

blair, nebraska
whoever drew this map wore rollerskates
with crayons tacked to the ankles,
pinned tail on the donkey down the hill

DeLuca's for Dinner

My grocery bill seems justified
when my feet are a foot underwater.

thanks for the oatmeal, but you're trembling in those boots

here and there, really
is that all there is

sheets of ice and fireball spaghetti
brimstone, brimstone

The Tapir

The tapir is Brazilian, Malayan,

not Scotch. Opaque, not adhesive.

And he'll have you know, 

it just goes to show you, 

pronunciation is key. 

beauty pageant paradox

in every other species
the males parade their plumage

Who Sorrow Could Have Been

When you put on movie-monster makeup
and hid among classmates, I knew I could
still find you.
Even in the dark of night, guided by our kindred wanderlust.
Even though I'm tired.
Even though this bed of leaves is comfortable.

And I won't fall for that line about looking for directions.
Don't leave your horse with me and we won't have a problem.
Is it true that a last minute baptism in stagnant well water
all-in-all turns out just the same?

zwump

bouquet of radishes
clutched to my breast,
grubby beats rustling roots

while overhead your spaceship
rains rime, floating syrupy
in a brume of blue teardrops

Just a Limerick

Behind the nightstand there lay
a grief-stricken Weeble. Oy vey!
He said, "I prefer cushy throw pillows
to pushy bedfellows,
and I'll take a good breakfast over either any day."

clones of abraham lincoln

i will give you a penny for every dream my squirming
brain dreams you into.

there will be many pennies in an enormous marble urn
etched with fifers and leafy bunches of grapes. and they will
seem ordinary and sparkle in the sun, but of course when you
dip your hand inside they will melt, or they will all disappear.
or your finger will tear right through what turns out to be only
a delicate membrane of butterscotch pudding skin onto which
someone very clever has made countless bas-relief cameos
of abraham lincoln.

underneath will be a baby crocodile who bites your hand off
in one chomp. the bones in your wrist will protrude like the
spout of a toppled porcelain teapot, and your blood will be thick
seeded raspberry jam.

and the crocodile will swallow, and smile, and in a tiny
tattered etching twisted round the edge of the hole you
tore, abraham lincoln will wink, then pretend that he
didn't.

you are dreaming right now. here is a check for 400 million dollars.
there is an atm on the corner that abraham lincoln is using, and
many clones of abraham lincoln are waiting to use it in one long line
behind him, an S-curve slotted with top hats that glimmers faintly
and disappears into the distance.

The Maladjusted Malboro

His bad breath left me
silent, blind, and confused.
Sure, I wasted a shuriken.
But at least I'm back to my senses.

shallow dungeon, komodo dragon

coffee from a stained blue cone
or letting inhibition slip when light slides through
cake stand crystal, of olive oil on the eyes,
self-preservation in ceremony

No Snake Celebrities

I may not know how to act like Richard Gere,

but I can turn a squiggle

into a rabbit in a scarf like no other.

bivouacking

bored as bison, we victualed
at the hems of vapid cratches, munched
our sallow hay until the milkmaids
wandered home. at dusk the vacuolate
cosmos coughed its clumpy
vapors, globulated cherry brambles
awash in stark pellucid blue.
you were dozing back-lit
on a mountain of pale straw.
blissful unworried snoring
rattled the bottom lip
that tented your rough gums
and rose, evaporating
in the malted midst of space.
there was a scraping sound
from the bottom of our trough,
freak bean-eaters rappelling
with hopes for soft escape.
the sun had drained completely
in the horizon's hairline cracks.
wide awake, i tried in vain
to scratch your hieroglyphic
from my hoof.

Be Mine 4 Ever (Spoiler Alert)

Never have I been so scared as when watching
a hallucinated miner kill a frolicking babette.
Except for that time when my parents tricked me
into riding that ride at Disney World, 1994.
Maybe it was the 3D that made them comparable.
Maybe it was the acrylic yarn blocking my eyes.

applying for internships

i got paid to slop mayo on hoagies and wear a stupid hat
when i was 14, and now i'm a grownup
unpaid internships hurt my pride
why don't you want to pay me to pore over manuscripts
and bring you lattes procured in painstaking code
i will wear my large eyeglasses more often
i will clear my throat before answering the phone in a polite and professional manner

i just want to write poems in my bathrobe
and eat toast on top of a quilt
and be a writer of poems with a typewriter
preferably blue

i don't have a bathrobe
but if you pay me $10 an hour i can afford to buy a bathrobe
i will not get evicted if you pay me $10 an hour
to bring you lunch
and stamp your manilla envelopes
and pull the metal spike through the loop and flatten the two prongs so the envelope stays shut, and put it in a mailbox

I'm most-importantly him

A broken bookshelf breaks my heart.

PS I'll try harder next time.

reconsideration, after noticing a thumbprint in the wax of giambologna's 'astrology'

still,


life

To the Impatient In-patient

The sooner you sink into the earth,
the sooner you can emerge as another
overbooked, grated model of perpetuity.
All in all, you'll be the same--another
age-defying, brownie-burning perplexity.

orchidectomy

this is no blossoming world
like one conjured by words, not a flower,
no peduncled sugary swell, no particular
pretty thing

Our Getaway

Our getaway got us into
a balloon on the brink
of bursting. Still we
rose and drifted,
drifted and descended
and found a place,
on the face of something
more or less perfect.

So we stayed. Haste paid off
and put us in our place.
The place right next to
that mountain and
those trees. The dust
in the air reminded you
of why we ran and
why it would be best for you
to return.

I stayed and lay in the sun
and under the trees and
in between all those dust particles
because someday you would
run, into a rowboat with six holes,
and find out that ideal drying
can be done under this sun
and these trees.

first scarf

knitting is like bunnies,
she says, because you think it's quiet
but when you listen closely--
little noises

i am marveling
at how this methodical needleclink
somehow elides tedium. i can't help but wonder
who discovered this
and whether or not their first finished product looked
like a soggy stalk of giant asparagus draped
over their shoulders, a vestigial twist
of limp crepe paper streamer
days after the last party guest stumbles home

I just don't care, Hayden Panettiere

Advertisers with avarice can s my d
and you will some day see that I prefer simple silliness
to overindulgent bs. No, funny business.
Just turn off the television
and make me laugh that laugh I laughed
in the morning when it was too cold and you were still
groggy and lagging.

simile (some poems write themselves)

today i got a text message
from my friend kevin that said "driving
is like ice skating
with your car"

i read this and smiled
thinking of my sister's '94 saturn
in a sequined skirt, trailing figure eights
on a frosted field
of flattened wheat

i had been eating
children's cereal
from a yellow box, from a blue bowl

a jovial mariner
with a high-gloss mustache and epaulets
saluted from the neon cardboard

"making out" i replied
"is doggie paddling with your lips"

crunch-a-tize me, cap'n
mouthfuls of wet fur and chlorine

"truth!" kevin said,
adding, as an afterthought,
"math
is like sex
in the universe"

A Lack of Motivation

High school obligations will lead to my complete obliteration.

moose

i was sixteen and smashed on tequila
kneeling wretched in a gutter
on a massapequa street

the boys fed me something unspeakable
from the slipshod rotisserie
around back, piked in the frozen ground

then they laughed their infinite
laughter, rock band of elephant
poachers, hemolytic
tessellations

that night gave over a secret
that you never did shit to fix. but you saw it
spilled down my clorox-blue parka
plain as i said it aloud

Association

Your hair, the needles of my childhood pine tree,
taught me to loathe the smell of pomade, Pine-Sol.

sharkskin is made of denticles, like thousands of tiny teeth

i spackled the top of your sternum with gesso,
explaining, "these freckles are fading." impartial,
you kept watching shark week: the glint of predatory
teeth, the ominous concerto. torpid blue light
dribbled over your t-shirt's heave and collapse.
i detailed each fleck with blood-orange
oil, imagining how, through your pulfrich
glasses, melanin might rise in
melonballs. a floating matrix of violet, a
sniggler's trade map of the bejeweled abyssal
deep. i put the paints away while, in real life, you
reached to adjust the volume on the tv. under my
breastbone, a spinefish was ballooning, quietly.

My Tapeworm (Sushi and Latkes)

It was dark when I got out of bed.
Sure, it was only four, but dinner
would be served soon.

Stomach unsettled because
downstairs awaited a combination
even a tapeworm could not stomach.

All you can eat, Wormy--
I'd rather chew on the coffee table's blue legs,
although I do still wish they had been a few shades lighter.

antipoem

that cloud
is cloud-shaped