When I want to beat up the world with my fists, my forearms boil over with an easy rage. Sometimes I forget to breathe and nearly die. In my…

  for Frannie, at four months   Even in sleep you hunger: purse your lips and bellow your cheeks as though to nurse from the world. Material things, you’ll outgrow,…

  White Guy #1 to receive White Guy #2 Named Fellowship for Distinguished Position as Dead White Guy #3 Chair of University Department X.   White Guy #1 named recipient…

  i. in seventh grade I learned to pray in Spanish is rezar edged like razor, work & worship, I learned adoption was life’s sword: maldición//malediction, bendición//benediction, doubled & edged…

  broke clean—one corner snapped away from the blue-black lacquered whole, a long slender triangle like a gymnast in three-quarter split exposing raw bone of ceramic. Your response, a heavy…

  1. You are wood, you are wool, you are the intricate skeleton of the desiccated leaf, of the dead dehydrated papyrus-bloom   2. you are simple as a scroll…

  Snow falling outside means I can’t run from the knot in my jaw muscle, that root-deep twinge where my teeth meet their pained, swollen gum. I make bread and…

  A Father   Now I’m as liberal as the next man but pink toys? A pale streak all over him. I was drinking draft beer. American as anything. It…

  The plums rained down on us, then the fireworks. We ordered a package and we took out the trash. We had pulled weeds all season, sprayed aphids, we had…

  The blankness of the animal is profound or, no, a lack of blankness, a total   clarity of feature, her color particular and unnamable against   the snow whose…

  after R.S. Gwynn   She takes the hundredth call of the day before banging her toe on the table which happens more than she cares to say. She yelps—longs…

  a sculpture by Jim Dine   Following the map, I find them— a pair of enormous black hearts,   faces, hammers, crumpled cans emerging from the surface,   as…