My mother confuses Topeka with Toledo.
My father confuses me with my mother.
Spain didn’t conquer Kansas,

The windows around Gramercy have eyes.
We look, they look back.
A brook cut through the swamp.

1.

hyperarticulated giant black ants endlessly boiling out of a heaped-up hole
in the sand

To spectate
is a verb
that does not

Sometimes you wait a while for the bus—
the bus of happiness
probably—just now passing the fried pie hutch

She was older, sleek, and had a bite to her, but I was bolder with my knees on either side of her.

She’s given up sex.
She’s given up travel.
She’s given up the rush

The coat of Italian red eyes me. Wool
Unraveling from abuse,
Creased and spent at the armpits.

a homely word:
a plosive, a long cry, a quiet stop, a silent letter
          like a storm and the end of a storm,

How much the colonel loved his granddaughters
you will never know.
                           Their laughter filled his black Mercedes