colonized by this virus i hear echos in the metros strangers similarly occupied we are stitched by our shared static thorax, strains seeded by eyes, by long tired bike rides in the rain by exhaustion that sits in shoulder blades sorrow in our foreheads headaches at the ways things stay the same.

Tired like bees, thick with service and sweet low and heavy to the street bright striped to make ends meet. On a stool on the sidewalk beneath large pink nudity, knees crossed with stockings in the cold breeze hair hard and high, watching over the honey not quite queen, not quite making eye contact just [...]

play codes, soft white clothes clamps and microbes, bitter endings curled cordial on your rough tongue and swiftly undone, slipping needle nosed into wet wellsprings of hope and other smells gone missing.

bulging thick blue blown glass, fat like a father’s love gets in the way of things with its quotes, parades and ceramonies. this was a typical gift, a matching set and one fell off your bike on the way home. once the relationship is broke we keep rebreaking – I broke your lover’s pottery, even [...]

Blood raw red curtains and a courderoy sea ‘this bed is our country.’* Even when I inhabit it alone, loyalty is to our songs and the tops of churches and trees even the arc of the ugly big O on the east side of town, even the dust and spider webs, even the dry clicking [...]

We crawled into the white bed, white room, white head, white breath. We crawled inside the rasping machines and morphine dreams to hold her cold feet. My cousin’s belly, round with Sophie inside, met the odd swollen edges of our cancerous grandmother, met the slim sideways edges that are mine. Calm, once we are on [...]

The word spine is beautiful, a slow descent with close-up, steady soft skin incline an elegant source of slant rhyme a thread through the neck between body and books frail armour for us both. meanwhile i am losing the battle against mine pushing through skull plate and shoulder blade vertebrae play my organs to cacophony [...]

This is a fantasy: take me out that small backdoor and I am unstitched long enough for you to push my skirts up with the angry bassline in the bar against my spine. In this you are not kind, breaking thin glass capable of sharp sounds sweeping it to the ground like I imagine that [...]

wind in the trees out the window, huge waves, like crowds at a rally, like species throwing up their arms in surrender, like hearts fluttering with blood, like neurons leaping for stories to tell our souls, like children waving to us joyfully, lovingly, good bye good bye. like dunes in the desert eating roads.

rocking at my shows, you told me you hid your autistic inadvertant reaction to sound waves in the music till you fell in love with that avant garde girl with the odd bird poetry and casio keyboard and the bright catchy tunes that made you shake. I knew a deaf five year old once who [...]

this tree has branches like streamers up the red fire escape with celebration all it’s leaves want to fall and fill the white noise with yellow like coins on your breast, on your birthmark, on birds like small clams, little hopping pockets of commentary, they divy up the spoils and crumbs and the space around [...]

Sixteen pannelled awnings, clumps of disjointed spine, poke through futon and flesh on either side. The moss mold moves beneath us. In this lovely apartment splints in the moaning soggy wood grown ingrown and old waiting for the landlord, who is processing pharmaceuticals in the phillipines, to care, it’s not holding its breath but holding [...]

marjorie wore the tired drawl, and drunken sexiness, and harsh quick wit, that she’d found could draw her to the center of laughing men and, usually, keep her safe from them until the mornings stretched long and the feeling of missing something took up too much space in the room and all the customary jeans [...]

Some voices sound out of lungs like a fine oak barrell, or at the edges of notes run their hands through dry grain, or play hard on the sinews of the face and throat as though with a heart-broken bow. Some sounds all feel the same. When I closed my eyes outside that cabin, our [...]

some voices sound out of lungs like a fine oak barrell, or at the edges of notes run their hands through dry grain, or play the sinews of the face and throat as though with a heart-broken bow.