Someday you will leave this town and not look back
but for now you keep hurtling toward
the red center, the road unfolding,

Jayne Mansfield isn’t dead.
I know.
She isn’t living, maybe, but she isn’t dead.

A toenail clipping floating in a toilet bowl
like a crescent moon reflected in water

the summer rolls up its black tongue: from inside the machine 

Where do you come from?      Where did you grow?     Your leaving
brought you here     To the nest at the center of your home     Where
have you flown?     Your lowered gze at the center of your home     Where

When I woke up, I did not listen to what the poem told me to write down

There is no room for them horizontally,
vertically, or in a jar: glass or ceramic—

Memory’s branch quivers
beneath the weight of a butterfly
How am I to know what it wants
without asking

 

So one day the late Bird highly fortified strolls into this posh
boite itself and down there, leaning on the bar, is Wallace
Stevens—newly arrived, old LLD tucked away, sheepskin in
wolf, flirting with the minishirted bartendress—whom he
welcomes.