for lost causes like the gravity of granola in mornings. The heaviness of missing bacon fat. Or the folds of you when you stretched on top of me then…

  my father tells me i look beautiful in my blue collar dress and shows me a pair of cufflinks he reserved for my wedding day and i like to…

  my story is the same as every little boy’s in a white wedding dress using a hairbrush as a microphone crimson lips smudged from the aftereffects of fidget- ing…

  Babushka planted her sunflowers so full of seeds, they gave all of themselves away to the motherland now red with oxide ore deposits. Each dirt road & cracked field…

  Like the Chukar Partridge of 1931— they were dying in hunting grounds: ++++++a black necklace wrapped around their white cheek & throat. Each gun shot, a force of adrenaline…

  When I use a mirror ++++++See how the sting lingers ++++++++++++++++++++++++in my body. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++It mocks each lift of my arm ++++++the hiding flesh ++++++++++++jagged, pale. Each startle of skin…

  For the first time, I am digging in the new yard I never wanted, its soil unbroken for decades, now webbed with roots from trees felled and shredded long…

  Many people, myself included, profess fondness, though once I ripped them out by the handful. What was I thinking, that afternoon and those ten years? Now when my mother…

  —after Natalie Shapero For any thing that is in nature, a thing also that needs it. Continents apart, scientist have filmed the tender proboscides of moths feeding on birds’…

  Enter…the QUEEN with SUFFOLK’S head —Henry VI How long did I lie in the pool of my own life before you brought me to your lips? There was a…

  For months afterwards, I don’t long for wildness. I listen less to songs than their chord progressions, read only Agatha Christie novels, set rigid rules about when to sleep…