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Poetry
A Few Days After My First Vaccine
Walking by the lake, I lose an earring / and don’t even notice it at first, / overwhelmed as I am / by the strangeness of everything.
October 2021Intensive Outpatient
On our way back from a Mother’s Day celebration in Newport Beach / my sister turned to me & said, Have you ever thought about treatment for your / eating disorder? For years the only eating disorder in the house was hers.
October 2021Almost Cha-Cha
I tell people that when I was born, my mother / was on drugs, and so she named me Brett. / But what I don’t tell them is that she almost / named me Charlotte and wanted to call me / Cha-Cha.
October 2021It’s Friday Afternoon In The Florida State Penitentiary And The Men Read Poetry
and Ronnie says Robert Hayden got / it right, a whipping be like that — “the face that I no longer / knew or loved” — damn, that’s it, right there and / Ronnie doesn’t blame his mama for beating him so bad, but / maybe she could have kept her pipe in the car and then maybe / he never would have ended up in a foster home
August 2021The Buttonhook
My son sprinted to each traffic light / in his black hat and dark Sabbath suit / while the elderly congregation two miles away / waited for him to help lead morning prayers.
July 2021Before
It’s not as though I was going on dates, gorging / on the daily bread of sex, before the governor told us all / to stay home.
July 2021A Slip Of Paper
found amid the rolls / of gift wrap: / a Trader Joe’s receipt / from December 23rd / eight years ago
July 2021Near The End
Without her glasses she couldn’t see, / so she’d touch her thumb to the bristles / of the two toothbrushes / to figure out which one I’d used, / then she would use the other.
July 2021Wanting Things To Be Different
A relapse of Lyme disease: / fever and chills, flickers of pain. / I want to sleep all the time, and my arms ache. / I lie on the steel grate that juts over the stream.
June 2021Access Road
I don’t know if other people feel like there’s a life / running alongside their so-called real life like an / access road runs alongside the main highway.
June 2021
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