Dear Sal,

In a room on the river
we crooned hymns
to honeysuckle, eulogized
a stuffed trout, carved nectarines
& waltzed within
the scent. You fed me
dark bread slathered in butter
& I did not speak of
the French, the Germans, my mouth
too full of sweetnesses. Your steady hands
aglow, you touched me
with such unbearable
attention, accurate
fingers unlacing the slaughter,
numbers & the names of countries
crumbling in your eyes.

Dear Sal,

For nearly a year I have been building a Word.
Hammering letters together, welding with a torch
that shoots a tongue-colored flame. I began

my work while remembering your pinky. How she
stands apart from all the others. They, a cluster
of gossips; she, preening, disturbing the sensibilities.

It is almost finished, the Word. I would say it here
but the walls would come crashing down. I wish
to say it in your house. In your father, mother,

brother & his twelve-gauge altar. Instead I holler
recipes at lizards, cry Kaddish over birds that dash
their brains out on the door. The Word is going

extinct in my mouth. Sing with me, Bashert, once
more. There is not enough room in the world
for our silence.
Dear Sal,

Burning beds in a field I command the light, unleash it in the direction of your dress.
I repeat your name to a cavalry of stars, hold to their noses a section of your dress.

You found me trembling like a donkey at the altar, starving & skinny, my hair a ghost’s nest.
You took me inside to bind my wound in water, nourish me on the confection of your dress.

A basket of peaches underneath your arm, the orchards of silence uprooted in your chest,
you stroll through the blinding honeysuckle, its scent the only explanation for your dress.

A sycamore sags on the side of a road, bones of a forgotten saint, unsung & under-blessed.
May you be delivered up from her roots, may you bloom in the rich salvation of her dress.

How dark is the sum of the unburied dead? They scale the moonlight & bellow distress.
What relief awaits when you unfold the fabrics & open the organization of your dress.

Refugees cascade from the mouths whales, in a language of no they are the last remaining yes.
I came from the dark with a war in my teeth, seeking clemency here in the nation of your dress.

I die in in the tub as the coffee is brewing - I am lifted by the angels, I am lifted by regrets.
I am brought back to life in a room on the river, howling about the negation of your dress.

Dear Sal,

After all these years I’ve reached my age. To celebrate I eat a tuna salad on rye
the size of a Buick. There is the mishegas & there is the mishegas. The man who
gave me a voice, he didn’t even speak the language. Oy, what a shondeh. Do you
know what the word Bashert means? It means I would go back to Europe for you.
I would eat mayonnaise on the Eiffel Tower. I would surround a tree with presents
for the phantoms of our children, sing to the Rhine in the language of my people.
If that, Bashert, is your wish. What have I been trying to say about desire? Stuffing
tuna salad sandwich into my mouth. It is not something I can afford. At this time
of day the park is almost empty. I want to hide in the grass & make animal sounds,
get the whole damn place to myself. Bashert, imagine! Just the two of us, strolling
hand in hand, the beast of longing whimpering under our shoes. We call it longing
because it takes forever. I am, years old. How can it matter? I hope somehow I have
made you laugh. What do you call the most Jewish fish? The anchoyvey. I made that
one up while the moon ate my legs. Ah yes, & the shadow is mine. My beard, heavy
with fish & salt & seeds. What do you call a garden on the bottom of the ocean?
When the garden rises up in you, Bashert, what do you call?

Algona

the wedding is at the house
I’d drive to after track practice,
the house she grew up in,
where we’d play Beetle Adventure Racing

the first time I went
to Sarah’s house, I’d never taken that left
in front of the SuperMall before,
I didn’t know there was a town there,
that I imagine exists as a self-sustained world
built just for you, with a Dairy Queen
and library

those summer nights we’d go to the park
across the street from Robyn’s house
and push each other on the tire swing

and after things changed,
I was still friends with your sister
I would swoop her in my truck
and I would see you standing
and watching

7-Eleven Part 2

I walked to the 7-Eleven
on the intersection of M and 8th Street,
the one we’d go to after Monday track practice,
the one across the street from Teriyaki Wok,
where we drank Slurpees in the bed of my truck

7-Eleven is now a boulangerie
with floor to ceiling windows on a boulevard,
watching bakers as they enter,
I’m drinking banana flavored coffee

I see nouveau riche in front of over-flowing
trash cans eating foie gras and burger dogs,
and the parks down the street, called Scootie Brown
and Indian Tom, changed their names
to Jamison Square and Tanner Springs

Secoma Lanes

I’m imagining taking the drive
to Pullman tomorrow instead,
through the Cascades and Columbia,
and the corn flowers blooming,
and the green glow of a car dashboard
in a rural college town

I used a hookah for the first time in Pullman
at a place called Munchy’z. I was 18,
in town for ‘Imagine Tomorrow’,
an alternative energy science fair

I watched 6 hours of Intervention today
it made me feel things
that I’m not sure how to identify—
I don’t know if I felt an amalgam of feelings
or if I felt something that people don’t feel
often enough to have named yet

I watched a video on youtube about
humans ceasing to exist
they said whole neighborhoods
would be up in smoke as soon as lightning struck

Seattle Aquarium

Oliver is visiting from Australia
I meet him and Zac at Alleyway
I ask Oliver what Perth is like
because I’m thinking about Susanna,
and wondering if she still lives in Perth,
or if she moved back to her small city in Japan

Oliver tells me about the difference
between Melbourne and Sydney until
I feel interested in Australia—
not for a previous lack of interest,
I just already think so much
about so many places

I mention a memory from senior prom:
we went to Chase’s—a split level house,
with meat rotting on the dining room table
and yellow cigarette tar on the walls

we smoked Backwoods inside,
Chase was stoned and Kirk played
Beach House over the speakers,
and Chase said ‘this music scares me’

Earlier that night, prom was at the Seattle Aquarium,
and after eating too much fondue,
I went to a concrete observation deck,
looked up at downtown Seattle.
the world seemed lonely and big

I go to Zac’s to sleep on his couch
because I missed the last bus home

after prom, as the sun came up,
everyone went to bed on Chase’s basement floor
I drove my mom’s minivan home
across Auburn, so she could use it that morning

earlier on prom night, Isaiah stopped by Chase’s
his tie was loosened and his collar undone
‘I had the best sex of my life in the car’, he said
I think he conceived his firstborn that night

christmas lights

I want to watch Dragon Ball Z with you
you’re in Washington with me
but you’re in Seattle and I’m in Auburn
you’re in a motel and I’m on Kirk’s back patio
and I don’t know even if you like Dragon Ball Z

spaces feel different when the spaces
are related to other space in a new way
like when I stopped by 7-Eleven
on the way home from working
at the carnival, I saw it as an island
in darkness and I didn’t know
Dairy Queen was across the street

but then I learned that behind that Dairy Queen
is what would become your house
and that 7-Eleven became part of the fabric
of something much bigger

I imagine you went to a Chinese garden,
I see you behind a tea house and pond
you are standing perfect and perfectly still,

I want to see you under
the Christmas lights above my bed,
that make your stomach skin look blue—
every color of light is within those Christmas lights,
so why does your skin only reflect blue?

hot tub

I remember at one of Jack’s big house parties,
not long before college,
I crawled into the hot tub in my underwear
four people joined me, including
Dwight and Danielle—they were dating at the time
we talked about the future and high school

we climbed on to the trampoline
and we laid flat on our backs
in the young, breezy, summer,
night air like a heated swimming pool

Kirk played his guitar laying down
we looked at space,
and talked to each other without
ever looking away from that canopy
that looked like negative exposures
of a stucco ceiling, and the whole time
you kept chain smoking on the back porch

i.
:: foliage
summer is long gone
winter is yet to come
let alone the spring but
let me come to think of it;
about the brown fall for
it can be a perfect lesson
about how death, of leaves
and living things, at the very
least, is beautiful and
ephemeral and beautiful and
ephemeral and be—

ii.
:: apollo
exploding tanks, wasted oxygen,
choked throats, dry lungs, almost lost
forever in foreign space and home;
but home was the last thing we recalled
because the suits that allowed us to walk
inside this zero gravity cubicle
needed to call a small station in that
rotting blue planet, first of all
we were almost forever lost
yet home was calling us home

iii.
:: postman
he gazes through the window
and mumbles about loneliness;
of himself, stamp and airmail,
an old office he will someday leave
for retirement but then he checks his
phone and giggles and stops mumbling

iv.
:: astral
look at the girl in sweater
and brunette milk braids
crying while knotting the
dead dots beyond the skies
we can hear you, little girl
don’t hope for silly things like
getting new band merch for
christmas or losing weight
to the constellations because
even when we have lived here
for million years, we are still
unseen, our hopes are crashing
and burned like one of those dead
dots, again, but we are also one of
the dead dots, again, just in the
other side of galaxy you don’t see

v.
:: feast
my name is toothpick
but nobody picks me before
dinner or in the middle of dinner
or after dinner; whenever

Purge #1

The rain wrote
rhythms on your
bathroom window,
begged, let
me in, but
it could never
cleanse you
like the sound
of the toilet
flushing
your 550 calorie
dinner.

Purge #2

Your neck nearly snapped
when you whipped your head back
toward me, fingers
still pressed
against the toilet.

Crumb

If I eat less they’ll love me If I eat less they’ll think I’m beautiful If I eat less they’ll stop staring at my plate My stomach My sausage-link fingers And maple syrup-sweat stained armpits Stop staring at me like split-pea soup spills out of my mouth each and every time I try to talk Expecting me to cry and cry and cry and cry and cry and thank them as they tell me they’re worried about me Eating my food Their food Everybody’s God damn food If I eat less they’ll love me If I eat less they’ll think I’m beautiful If I eat less they’ll win then I’ll look like them I don’t want to look like them I want to look like me If I eat less they’ll flick flick flick me off the table I’ll eat less until I’m nothing but a crumb

Ukulele

Luke gave me his mom’s Newports.
She hid them in the bathroom, buried
beneath body towels because
she lied—told her family she quit
after surviving Breast Cancer.

I took them to school with me,
zipped up in the front pocket
of my backpack.

I sold them to the alley kids
for a dollar a smoke because
they needed something
to look forward to, and
I needed money
to buy a ukulele.

Imagining what my life might have looked like if I’d been
undersexed: a junkie, perhaps, or someone who made
a great deal of money. The branch is bare where the kitten
once clung, its eyes telling me to hang in there. Or was it
me, imploring the kitten (& why should I wish for the
kitten to let go)? We must all hang in there together,
or assuredly we will all hang in there separately.
They sang about chasing the dragon, but it was just
a kitten, purring in the wilderness. Where there’s smoke, there’s
a dragon, & where there’s kitsch, there’s a kitten. Imagining
what life might have looked like if there hadn’t been nine of them.
Imagining Steely Dan chasing the kitten instead,
time out of mind but not, alas, out of joint. Oh, kitten:
maybe you didn’t drop. Maybe you raptured straight up.
Maybe you simply landed on your feet like, you know, a
cat. Maybe I’m simply staring at the wrong bare branch.
Undersexed isn’t the right word, but it doesn’t matter
because I wasn’t, I’m not. Still, I’ll never have a mug
that says World’s Greatest Dad. Or a kitten, or a cat.
But I cling to the branch. Persistance. Pass it on. Pass by.
That beautiful highway shimmies in the sunbaked twilight.
Behind the billboards, dragons dream, passed out atop bags
of gold, snoring smog, imagining what life might have looked
like if they’d chased a ball of yarn instead of the sublime.
Imagining the sublime up a tree again, dammit,
one more distraction, the goddamned stupid sublime. No, not
imagining. Knowing. All those hours. Picking them out of
a line-up. Telling them, one by one, to just hang in there.
Where the air is rarefied, & every branch is bare,
& the fireman on his ladder finds peace at last.