I found a lengthy word with a non-Russian ending,
unwittingly, inside a children’s storybook,
and turned away from it with a strange kind of shudder.

When we take the downhill runs into account,
the world of avalanche and thaw, the shifts
in altitude, patterns that trace them down

You can only have a lot of power,
never enough:

The horrendous infantile
shrieks and caterwaulings
of our dirty existential alleycat

Flinging sticks and calling
to an amphibian black dog,
he clings, buoylike, though probably

I bought a camera, though there were
many reasons not to.
In spite of the reasons not to

But which of us is the mademoiselle?

Why do it? shrilled the bird,
the as-yet-unnamed, a
candidate for new coinage,
namely widewit,

Swallowed by blood-red vinyl of the hotel lounge,
I drain the last of a grasshopper—my first cocktail,
ever. You loosen your tie. Dad, glare at headlines

My index finger nestles in your hand.
You run a penknife’s blade beneath the nail.
Discomfort is a thing we understand.