i have gathered my losses
into a spray of pain;
my parents, my brother,
my husband, my innocence
all clustered together
durable as daisies.

it lay in my palm soft and trembled
as a new bird and i thought about
authority and how it always insisted

today i mourn my coat.
my old potato.
my yellow mother.
my horse with buttons.
my rind.
today she split her skin
like a snake,
refusing to excuse my back
for being big
for being old
for reaching toward other
cuffs and sleeves.

in the latter days
you will come to a place
called memphis.

When Dionysus and Apollo met,
the gods were angry (the goddesses were sleeping)
that two such equals and such opposites

He strikes a match and she strikes a match;
these first two
go out before they can light the candle

You said you wanted to see
some baby pictures of me.
So here they are. Before you look at them

In a blow to Marxist thought, our romance red-shifted
from farce to tragedy. I had the paper trail to prove it,
a receipt from the erotic bakery with your phone number

Hi Roy. Hope all is well;
just wanted to drop a line
to let you know we miss you.

The difference in the speed of the thought process of a man who has just snorted coke and a man who hasn’t is a very strange number which has a cosmic meaning, that is, it enters into the cosmic processes. This number is 27,000.