J & C & I peel our greens

into trash bags a little fast

our tempos try to forget

debt’s discipline trash bags

of greens pile against the fence

I was turning the lichen in the cemetery into a meal, I was delicately harvesting the lichen that covers his mother’s gravestone and I was going to make a salad with it.

There was cruelty in the pits there were

Grace notes connoting invisible
Satisfactions there was a cloud 

Of purple exhaust glittering with

Fossil flowers & the looming 

Silhouettes of yet-to-be evolved birds.

Hector asked if anyone had run into Gloria. She’d had her last chemo on Friday, he said, which most of us already knew. But no one had seen her since then, all agreeing it was likely she had family in town. And what a marvel it was—I often thought this—knowing the intimate developments of near strangers’ lives. 

a conceptual shrimp uses its limbs to reshape the reader’s mind, mounding and clefting your mental world until it is the mental world of some other creature: shark, scallop, arthropod boiled down to pure flavor crunch.

It was my mother who taught me that hummingbirds don’t sleep: they fall into a state called torpor, which is deeper than sleep, more akin to hibernation.

I’m a little out of the loop.
Before the service, I buy breath mints
instead of flowers.
I wear the wrong shoes.
I leave my facial tissue in the car.

of mercy, this
is the oval egg
where mercy laid waste
and, wasted, layed
down her altar

“We can break the fourth wall. We’re writers—we do that.”

“I’m not that kind of writer,” I said.

I keep meaning to write a poem about something really smart.