destroyer
nobody thinks i think i’m pretty
i’m on my period in the graveyard
by the monument formerly known as ground zero
and i don’t feel anything but a little
first-world hunger
are you far away from me
says
the bluebird of happiness
i’m hungry i say and that rock
looks like half a peanut
would you like milk
o no thank you
we are the only vertebrates says meryl streep capable of such unbearable
destruction
down for whatever
i found a burnt sienna discman at daniel’s
i held it over my head like the sun
i can’t tell if that changed me
like i want so badly
behold the bridegroom cometh
go ye out to meet him
i would
if i weren’t sober
my excitable stomach
all its nerves
resembling graveyards
like this one
i went to and bled on handfuls and handfuls
of shredded linden petals
and bled
and then went home
and made blingees of your dead pet
because i love you
last night i was on the metro
it resembled a pill
i skated over the river and the big pubescent thug
dares the little one to offer their blunt to me
and i take it
the three of us resemble happiness
reference a good time like the river
is revealing our image and also
denoting its very own
impenetrability
fear o fear fuck you fear i am seeing other people
i am slutty like rotisserie chickens look slutty
stupid saporous
object-on-object
don’t go
i’ve gotten so used to you
come
on my tits in lifelike cotillions
the tv says
if you believe someone else is responsible for your suffering
you can call this number
i think i’ll just sleep it off see
winona is free
so’s wifi
i can go to bed now
Weep City
Fall I’m in Weep City. Storefronts weep signs. Egg salad sandwiches weep their guts onto plastic wrap. In the gutter languish brown things and paper napkins dab at them in places. Gum into the ocean, where fish weep water into waste into water and they don’t even know. One wall is covered in art one is covered in windows. Clouds like dendrochronological blooms: a woodcut pretending to be clouds on a mountain: neither wood, nor clouds: ink on paper: 2008. I think of kinds of grasses in Vermont. Mountainous heaves of grass and cows stomped their hooves. That costume party when I drunkenly wept into the chest of my Sundance Kid, one sad little Indian. My racist tiara exhaled feathers onto the floor. Everyone at that party was drunk and wept into one another and it smelled like cows.
Here’s a story water was timeless and then it was rationed. Manzanita grew crooked on the bluffs. Succulents were in. They love the salt air; it’s all they’ve ever known. My father and I lived in a forest when the forest was wet and we harvested lettuces disguised as birds sleeping in the peat, and ate them off paper plates. Each wing papery and veined. In a cool place banana slugs protracted their eyes patternlessly. At night their eyes grew erect and swallowed the forest. I crawled into the wet sack of my sleeping father’s cheek. Slugs split into other slugs so they can live forever. It doesn’t have to be hard.
Daniel weeps salt over his city fries and says he’s looking for a sign. I don’t remember what we’re talking about or why he wants one. Maybe a sign is looking for you, I say, and I’m joking, and we’re both quiet. The couch is like a padded envelope and Daniel and I sit in it and weep lassitude. One of us stretches over the other in white underwear like a Flemish rabbit over a fruit bowl. The train is audible outside. That bookstore in Montpelier and the townie who wanted a first edition Tree Grows in Brooklyn, for the opening poem was special, she said, and for the poor.