Teens

If I don’t taste the complicated waves—
if I only see the rolling,
only hear the roiling up
or smell those…

Remember how you didn’t fall yesterday
even though you thought you would?
Life can be like that all the…

The sprayed cockroach doesn’t know
it’s already dead.
                           It’ll scratch around 
behind the refrigerator 
                                    while…

The sky is a sickly
smell, even a crow
cannot fly and will
land to nestle
and breed in
twigs and plastics…

It’s an hour before noon, and Amtrak train no. 56 rips a path
through the rain outside Baltimore,
its …

An antique spacesuit with a skeleton inside it.

For many years, it has circled the earth.

___

Sometimes…

Deltaic deposits deepen hues—
not green, but that green,
not blue, but that blue—

In the small museum,
a…

Not an optimist. I lie awake at night and say the name
of everyone on the block and for three blocks …

While I waited
fall came on.
I sat in one
bright interstice
and nothing
filled, it was
already at the brim…

Here, my one raucous prayer
coaxed from this poor drum,

my double heart, under a beat-up slat
of divine…

Under the billowing heat of the white
tarpaulin church tent, my mother lowered
her worshipping hands and…

There is a woman who lives on a bed.
She is awake
watching the magpie that comes each morning.
Awake…

First, I took off my jacket,
then my shirt, pants,
shoes, underwear, then

my skin, then my muscles,
then…

At the playground, my mother hid from me, I couldn’t find her, and I called her name a thousand times…

Who art in Cali.
Programmer by trade.
Thy start-up come,
thy will become
an FTSE 500.
Give us this day our…

Wild for once, we drenched and drugged and flung
our sunstarved bodies into brunching and clubbing and…

Of all the species
of eight creeping things

I burst my pink peppercorn
of DNA and became a bird,
like you…

For those who don’t come to the end of this poem,
some harsh and endless wave of ocean
will bring to…