In what ways is a manuscript an exhibit? In what ways are these words animate? Maybe you understand these pages as an artifact, sacred words from an NDN; or maybe you read me as a sex worker of language, one who strips and fucks the page and spills himself all over it?

When I close my eyes and think of my hometown, the elements that come to mind are not that much different from what my great-grandfather encountered when he arrived in Cleveland from his Ukrainian village of Staryava almost a century ago, in 1929.

21. When you say you’re going home, they ask: To Belgrade?

22. For them, it’s as though this war hasn’t happened.

And yet,

23. There are exceptions.

MANON: If this keeps up,

THE WRITER: says Manon, who looks at the sky, which is not letting up at all, not lightening anywhere,

MANON: Because it looks like it’s going to keep this up.

Sandusky carried a raw and pallid three-season grayness of any small-sized Midwestern industrial town, but I knew we still carried the title Color Capital of the World. The hard part was that no one in the present world remembered the distinction.

There were two ships that passed & made it safe to shore

I want to stop using metaphors for the things no one wishes to hear

Jim watched the television in the waiting room of Dr. Mallory’s office while he waited for his test results. Something was playing on a loop on the screen.

Today I'm gonna escape my body in public. I'm gonna ask you to luxuriate in a sound that feels like a fabric and drool and baby, tell me that's not home? Talk wrong and call that praise.

It came and went like a dream, as all good things do. 

It isn’t as easy as it sounds
Talking to dead people
And living people simultaneously
While attempting to be more
Than a cell phone tower

number one i hadn’t understood the importance of ambient light in the installation of the paintings in a narrow corridor that’s dimly lit fantastic

This one night, I’m not shitting you, we saw our friend—everyone called her Tex Ass—throw a guy right over a car. Just right over the top of it.

Sometimes, friend, you hold 
the knife. And sometimes, under a silence of wings
and empty light, the knife just won’t be held.

You were born from the light barricaded inside our nation’s fading grace // Someone always placing hands on you //

Long ago, I built a self outside myself. / I ate what my family ate, answered / to my name, but when they said let us pray, / I kept my eyes open.

I am not what you want for. I am a shadow / Built to remind you of what you need.

is greater than walking my woebegoneedness .

Most patients aren’t in as dire straits as the narrator of “Car Crash While Hitchhiking,” no. But due to embarrassment or fear of being judged, lying to one’s doctor is prevalent.

A woman checks her chicken coop at dawn / then posts the horror that she found: “Headless.

Nothing to stand on, nowhere to be: the calving of an internal interval.