Land like

silhouette.

mine.

it sits behind me.

She forgets a lot.

she already forgot five years ago how hard you used to work.

she’d already Completely forgotten how easily you became infatuated with
men just by watching them…

thin

I was sitting next to her
and she was just crying. Crying and crying.
We were sitting in the dark theater
watching a play about slavery,
Father Comes Home from the Wars,
and at certain inexplicable moments,
she would just cry.

model homes

They lived in model homes
so he knew exactly where to take her
when he carried her up the stairs.
Her house was like his house,
except their bed was in a different place
from his and his wife’s, which was by the bathroom,
whereas theirs was by the window.

a palindrome

she fell into a big, dark hole. she fell into a big, dark, down hole. a cold hole. the walls are dark. and it’s actually narrow. the floor is cold. her fingers, warm, bump against the crannies of the clay. the cold, clammy, clay. she has knees, but in this case they bang freely.

the long and skinny

i wanted to write this poem
about tiny purple flowers
that grow on a hill
and i imagined
that it would be long and
skinny,
the poem,
and that it would go on
for pages and pages
so that it would definitely be,
or at least
feel,
worth
your
money;
but then just now
as i started
writing
it
i

#drugs

Hi! Rachel,
Super
excited
to
meet
you.

You can call me Alice
or Anna
or Bellgarden
or Beatrix
or Beatrice,
whatever works for you.

well are ya

are u the kinda girl that leaves the house with her hair wet?
are u that woman that walks in, loud -
do u care if ur laugh is heard?
do u care if ur words are stale, salty, stiff, rich, lugubrious, languorious, glorious,
extramatrimonious, 
known, understood, 
painters of landscapes, creators of…

I saw hands once,
They were your hands.
Exact same gait and build.
But then again they held the news up in a way yours never would.

8.17.12

I was in Chinatown, and I noticed an older Chinese man.
He dropped something and it rolled around on the sidewalk.

It was a dried date.

He picked it up and he ate it.
Then he walked around, hunting for smashed, inch-long cigarette butts.
He picked each one up between his…