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Poetry

zoo/m/enagerie

December 3, 2020

Time is the distance between birth and death. Parallel universes appear in real time on your screen. Place is an illusion. For instance, I am in the Palace of Versailles.

On Solitude

December 3, 2020

Rats can laugh, but the dogs aren’t smiling: they’re hooked on oxytocin, which rises when we lock eyes with one another. Oxytocin is not dissimilar to OxyContin, an opioid analgesic which can result in a similar sense of euphoria or attachment.

Time/bomb

December 3, 2020

Your heart is like an island, like a bomb chambered for containment and you should handle my heart like a rare species of flower that grows only here, like a thing that can destroy.

Famous Writers

December 3, 2020

There must’ve been some incident, something to push both Dickinson and Proust into isolation, the horse thought as a student, but now he thinks time and immortality require one’s full attention. 

Children in America

December 3, 2020

go to the library to learn how to administer NARCAN
to stop their mother or father’s heart from overdosing. 

Mostly Hamburg: ’72

December 3, 2020

Confusion is the foreigner’s advantage. Natives 
tamp the nuance in their sounds. Stranger 
seeking refuge pockets vowels, picks gesture,
learns body, gets caught up on the cobble 

Cyclorama

September 8, 2020

Outside the Visitor Center—patrons queuing up in
khaki camo shorts, baseball caps, Where Big Bucks
Lie
, boxes of MoonPies wheeling by—two black
men with rubber gloves, with Windex, on a July
Monday, polish the bronze Lincoln.

Love Note: Surely

September 8, 2020

Surely you stay my certain own, you stay
obtuse. Surely your kisses were little poisons 
gripping tight my lips, my arms, mapping their way
across my unsure body. Surely, this fission

Greatest Nigger Who Ever Lived

September 8, 2020

in the selfie he is currently texting to “Lula Mae,”
the man next to me on flight 4853
to Columbia, dressed in a black turtleneck
and a thick double chain,

Excess

September 8, 2020

Two boys, pink in their manhood, lean over a balcony, full 
of teeth. Below: a brown man, skin tired of holding his bones. 
Work falls in shadows around his feet. 
The Puget Sound is bluer than any dream or sky. The boys loom, pink.

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