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  Me n Leo yakkity yak yak’d

  about writer’s

  block

  and the starchy long stroke of quote unquote God on the Meadow Walk and he didn’t know I was fully head over banana peels I mean in Kiehl’s I mean in straight up crappy love with him yet and maybe I didn’t either? Sand crabs poking their bodies & legs post wave Hindsight

  is Good & Plenty I mean 20/20

  clearly

  the worst American

  candy And what is candy, but a crush?

  Leo said it’s tangled up

  in waves in dreams in therapy That writer’s block

  (or is it god?)

  comes from being blocked up

  in other parts of the days

  of our lives

  of our lives

  of our lives

  This is a polysaccharide Effective deflection

  Rejection heavy,

  that he’d forgotten what the feeling

  of a good

  idea is

  But I’m standing right in front of you?

  I thought bubbled but never troubled

  the air

  with my utterance

  Instead I said, “this is the part where you ask me for my number”

  because I was committed

  to being my own damn romantic

  comedy that year—

  Our sublime times The Don Julio margarita mix of our situationship

  These are the Doppler blips

  that ripple resurface

  when Leo surfaces among the Chelsea Thicket

  Optimal frustration from the Odysseus years Golden Fleece of

  intimacy

  for the first time in like what

  6 months?

  A year?

  Two years?

  Seven years?

  Has it been SEVEN years? 1492? It was literally 69 billion years BC

  Dear reader,

  White as a bell you whisk me to a fever

  like the ruby cinnamon—Hey! Let’s make a vinaigrette

  Did you know molasses emulsifies the olive

  oil and keeps the little

  fat

  molecules from stumbling

  into each other, thus allowing the oil and vinegar

  to mix?

  A sauce is broken when the oil separates

  like a heart

  Sometimes this is inevitable, no matter how hard you shake the mason jar

  A bumble bee’s tiny hairs curl

  THE EPA’S PLAN TO CENSOR CLIMATE CHANGE DATA

  in the electric field

  of a flower

  and the seasons and the fields sway

  their harvest like a rolling

  sea

  The city cabin-fevered in the wake of winter, Sherlock & looking glass

  (it’s a gas, gas, gas)’d for an excuse

  to wear an eyebrow lift of shorts again

  I don’t know what this flower

  is called

  but in the breeze

  it looks like a butterfly on a string The dependably wild

  inconsistencies of spring Now the city

  keeps a sweater in its backpack—Balance

  is not unlike how rice and beans shouted “You complete me!” in the crowded train station millions of years ago. Dice the leeks. Snap off

  the inedible ends of the asparagus

  Salt/salt/salt until you can angel in it

  Wilkes: How do you feel?

  She swipes a curl from her face, blows out a swirl of smoke and bangs

  ashes into my baby cactus

  Me: Like someone put a sleeve of dry pasta up a mouse’s urethra?

  She didn’t ash into my baby cactus. I just like the way that sounds. We’re on her fire escape overlooking the belly garden of all Brooklyn apartment buildings. The day was in the low 60s but we’re in the high weeds. She ashes between the irons. Her landlord is back there, pulling plants and sucking her teeth.

  Wilkes: ASH HAPPENS!

  she shouts down. The landlord shakes her head, says something low and out of range.

  Wilkes: I mean about seeing Leo again

  Me: Everyone is talking about the Fermi Paradox right now, you know what that is?

  She hands me the spliff. I hold it eye level, staring at the ember raveling the white paper black and grey before crumbling away

  Wilkes: Of course! I wrote the book on Farm Socks!

  She rolls her eyes and lifts her palms up.

  Me: It’s like, against the infinity of space and all those stars and all those worlds out there, the probability of extraterrestrial civilizations other than us is extremely high. But where are they? Even if interstellar travel is really slow, our sun is relatively young compared to the age of the universe as a whole. They’d have had millions of years to get here.

  Wilkes: I think it’s paternalistic to assume we’d be demonstrably visited in our lifetimes. History basically just started recording itself. They could have come a million years ago and been like, this rock is trash!

  If . . . you’re not gonna smoke that? Pass, plz

  Nations are always outlived by their cities

  Dear reader,

  We are in a pot.

  One of us is the vegetables and one of us is the water. I can’t tell who is cooking who, like a late 80s Aretha Franklin song—we give ourselves up to each other. Into each other. Throughout each other. I THINK whoops I think that exchange is what Beyoncé bards about in “XO,” her love song to the crowd

  Track 1: “XO” by Beyoncé. The part where she looks out into the crowd and assures them, they are what she needs. That she gives them everything. It doesn’t deny finality. Love, then lights out. It simply identifies the grain of performance is her feed.

  I’m going to keep this short

  and sweet bc I am tall and BITTER:

  There’s a kind of stability

  There’s a kind of stability

  There’s a kind of stability

  being so thoroughly Teebs I mean seen

  A sly calm, indulging the part of you that stays when the rest hides or hurricanes away onstage. Another tug of skin on my skin, firming everything in place

  Dr. John says anxiety of the return is necessary. Conclusion

  must come for a new story

  to take place

  Track 2: “We Need a Resolution” by Aaliyah. The part where you reach the critical juncture of whether the relationship can be salvaged. Do I change? Do you change? Do we go on the same? Hurt is inescapable here. This resolve dissolves the doubt: We need to talk it out. Evasion writ large: The reason why we don’t have the conversation is because we’re afraid we already know the answer.

  Dear reader,

  I’ve been thinking about fuel sources that produce the heat of the fire that burns inside you and the term “resistive circuit” and active networks and mainly about Kirchhoff’s current law, that the sum of all currents entering a node is equal to the sum of all currents leaving the node by which I mean it’s pollen season again and it’s got my circuitry inconsolable and the City stopped texting me back which, wtf I’ve never been ghosted on by a whole City It’s very men TFW you want the City to know you hate it, but also like it doesn’t even occur to you to think about the City—Wait who are you? Ooh yeah, yr whatever anyway I’m having the Baja fish tacos you shd go to shell Sorry I mean have the macaroni I hear it’s Wait a minute who are you again? I’m talking to the freaking reader can you give me a minute jfc

  I’ve been thinking

  a lot about stretch denim

  that doesn’t also have a stretchy waistband


  (by which I mean nature’s cruelest disagreements)

  and I’ve been thinking

  about the slobbering of heat that is the promise of spring.

  In her book An Everlasting Meal Tamar Adler,

  waxing poetic on boiling cauliflower,

  writes, “Heat is a vital broker between separate things.”

  In the insanely popular early 90s alternative rock banger “Linger,”

  Dolores O’Riordan sings, “If you

  if you could return:

  don’t let it burn.

  Don’t let it fade.”

  Today, to wear out the woozy, to giddy the skittish dizzy into a steady

  simple rush of stillness I buttered

  around the city listening to The Cranberries

  as the air around me bounded

  into its summer self

  but literally two weeks ago there was a blizzard

  that thawed into a song.

  Springtime is so insecure, right?

  But at least we know where it’s heading Fiery

  lion I lay no claim on but whatever memory lies all the time

  [in three voices, like a braid: Gansevoort Woodland]

  Appalachian red, Cercis canadensis; SER-sis kan-uh-DEN-sis

  gray birches, Betula populifolia; BET-yoo-luh pop-yoo-lih-FOLE-ee-uh

  dogwoods, Cornus florida

  Are you an introvert or an extrovert? he whispers blacklight

  blackout

  as his bitty big balls bounce

  against the throat

  of my taint

  (by which I just mean my taint)

  Dear reader,

  I am a hoar on a book tour and traveling

  is so romantic, ain’t it? An ode

  that bodes of dynamism

  and gutter sluttery. Glittering sea

  of one night stand and

  kick

  stand

  dicks

  Camel Blue ash and pit stain tees

  ALEXA–SIRI:

  (What time does Panda Express open?)

  Panda Express, I mean James Brown, is dead

  Crowbar kraken awake every fire hydrant

  on every corner

  of every city

  block

  and mainline that shit into my veins.

  I’m planted

  in mustard-yellow slip

  ons at the waterfront

  of a new city made of mustard

  greens, metaphorical tether ball water features

  and a literal city.

  SEPTA. Charm City Circulator. MBTA.

  I’m sprouting

  a pink tank

  top

  at the bus stop of a new city

  made of absinthe bird

  sanctuaries, metaphorical troll doll jewel belly

  t-shirts

  and literal

  britches.

  I mean bridges.

  El train. Amtrak. Trolley.

  I’ve grown

  spray-on skinny

  high waisted acid washed old-fashioneds

  at the hotel bar

  in a new city

  made of tucked in black Wayne’s World t-shirts

  (oh dream weaver)

  and literal roundabouts.

  the MARTA. the Marc. the MAX.

  Track 3: “Alone” by Heart. The part where she expresses doubt about being able to confess her feelings to the lover, and wonders at what point she’ll be able to get the lover away from all others, “Alone,” in order to unload.

  Portland Oregon is a bunch of white ppl in a brew pub whose name is two random nouns like Sage & Mortar or Whimsy + Pickles or Straw and Freddy Krueger Glove Expectant

  faces expecting

  me

  to smile back. I don’t do that.

  Portland Maine, the other white Portland, is a bunch of full leg pants

  and poly pan-

  sexuals

  Tonight I am pierogies

  Ross Pierogies

  Beer battered fish tacos and jalapeño corn

  bread Aloe lavender under-eye nipple goops

  Obsessively checking my bank balance

  and vocal rest

  stop

  in Connecticut

  that has a Sbarro, a pick n mix candy store, a Taco Bell AND Chipotle:

  Proof that linear time is a gd sham

  Once, I wrote about being ancestrally from a desert

  that drought made me restless

  searching for a nourishing territory

  You know how some people

  are “all that”? Well I’m all appetite Hunger pang

  an ambulance

  siren speeding to another needy feeling

  The vernal bend rendering the cell walls softer, pliable without fully

  spilling into each other

  Shall I be a poem for you?

  I mean, I used “shall” tbh

  me af

  the human condition smdh

  the bible lol

  bibliosexual wtf

  the library iykwim

  No territory will ever satisfy me

  af

  SAVE OUR COURTS! SIGN THIS PETITION!

  Dear reader,

  A roux, I’ve learned tonight in this midcity dinner party apartment tucked somewhat safely away from asthmatic LA freeways, is the mixture of butter and flour used to swell sauces and soups and Paul’s baked sage mac n cheese that I’m whisking alive like an al dente Evanescence cheese-rock bop. Whistle while you whisk away the rage scrunched in yr boulders. I says to them around the table I says—

  I don’t have a food history.

  If the dish is, “subjugate an indigenous population,” here’s an ingredient of the roux: alienate us from our traditional ways of gathering and cooking food.

  Kumeyaays moved around what wd be called San Diego County with the seasons. The mountains, the valleys, the coast. Not much arable land or big game so we followed the food wherever it would go.

  Then the missions. Then isolated reservations on stone mountains where not even a goat could live. Then the starvation. Then the Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations. Whatever the military would throw away came canned in the backs of trucks. The commodities. The powdered milk, worms in the oatmeal, corn syrupy canned peaches. Food stripped of its nutrients. Then came the sugar blood. The sickness. The glucose meter goes up and up and up.

  I says to them around the table I says, I don’t have food stories. With you, I say, I’m cooking new ones.

  Being protective

  of yr recipes is only natural. Things get stolen.

  Cousin dies, some overdose, and another cousin

  has a daughter Incel man

  plows

  into ppl w/a truck in Toronto mostly women

  and there r something like 70 million

  more men than women in China & India and

  Roy SAYS HE HAS whoops says he has

  a new metaphor, except it’s not

  a metaphor A literal part of his

  heart

  has died

  says the echocardiogram

  he got before starting a new med

  but it’s fine he just needs to eat more farty

  salads and “Mamihlapinatapai” is the most precise

  word according to linguists

  from the Yaghan language of Tierra del Fuego

  something like when you leave a café bathroom and want to tell the

  next person in line it wasn’t you who took the smelliest dump in

  American history but you keep walking I mean

  the word is more like when two ppl look

  at each other and the look

  is that they both

  know

  what the other shd do but neither

  wants to initiate How in Kumeyaay, “howka” means “hello” but more

  like I see the fire that burns inside you A whole caravan of meaning in a

  s
ingle word and Wilkes

  after twalkin bout her non-invasive surgery

  says John Krasinski, at 6'3, is the shortest of three

  brothers the others 6'8 and 6'9 and I start to

  pal-

  pi-

  tate

  My back arches so hard I snap in half

  on the Link light rail on the way to drop

  off my stuff at Rich’s in Cap Hill

  b4 checking in w/Colleen b4 my reading at Mount Analogue

  at ZZZ Space and IMAGINE BEING

  THE MOZZARELLA IN BTWN THAT FUCKING SLICE

  OF BAGUETTE R U KIDDING ME 6'8 and 6'9

  I NEED TO BE IN A SMALL CLOSET IN A SHOE

  BOX APT IN THE CUT OF THE STICKS

  LIKE TOTALLY ALONE SUFFOCATING

  INTO A PAPER BAG and Jess texts

  me she’s got a mass inside her the size

  of an orange she’s going under next

  week and I’m practicing

  lines

  for when I officiate Becky’s wedding some kind

  of grand

  metaphor abt the golden

  hour A dappled kind of time when the sky is stained with more color than it has at any other time of day such that light bursts through everything Everything glows Everything haloed with light Everything looks like a memory A kind of waltz with impermanence and supper bells and time When even dust and clouds, those dull greys, reflect the magic of the father of the sky When the angle of the sun to the horizon means the light has to pass through more of Earth’s atmosphere and that compact of atmosphere filters out the blue hue light normally emitted by the sun, giving the hour its soft and golden name That light, that sliver of golden light, is light unlike any other light you’ll ever encounter—and that completely saturated natural light can’t be replicated by anything else Nothing we’ve ever made can come close to that glow Not a filter not a software not a bulb When you rise who you have been raised by, all the people who have angled and passed through your life and loved you and gave you shine to make you into this person A gathering of circumstances that produced the light of you right now in this moment & someone tells me “You shd wait

  five yrs in btwn publishing

  books like what’s

  the

  rush?”

  and I’m like did u not just read? My cousin died today

  and he was only two years older

  than me and it’s been this way my whole

  life like biiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinch

  I would LOVE to imagine

  being alive in five

  years but I have these bones u know?

  and just like that I’m writing

  a poem

  a poem

  a poem

  again

  The ephemerals big bloom