no matter why

or if, or in what way, what

I want to say is

“is wrong is a guy thing is a radical notion in the Czech Republic is the future”

“An acerbic alchemy of PBR and hormones

bubble up inside my mouth,

crammed in a theater showing My Bloody Valentine.

Drizzled spit and splatter campfire, bad decisions”

“His pigment box rattled. / His brushes bristled / in the morning sun. / Rain had come & gone.”

Are your friends writers as well? (is poetry all you talk about?) / Define friendship (my IG friends are closer to me than God)

“My grandma calls it / your bloom. Once I saw a used pad / on the bathroom floor, and the stain / did kind of look like a flower.

“I am reminded one morning in montparnasse cemetery / searching for markers in the fog with my new family”

“…you think about how the prettiest girl in your Catholic middle school / compared the bodies of girls who touched the bodies of boys to the body of Bathsheba.”

“ Like the sun, God / follows him home. Like the moon, he never marries. Chooses to adopt. / His father calls with bad news. The phone a brick in his hand.”

“I have a dream where I let someone in; I allow him to trace my lips with his tongue, salvage my exposed flesh, offering up my throat, my cheek, every vulnerable square inch my body possesses.

“worms inch

his nostrils and build

homes eggs hatch behind

glass eyes mother tells

me to pull the meat

off the bones it’ll

freeze well i puke”

“one line or two from poem. / use space slash space to indicate line breaks

“Since you’ve gone, I’ve watched rerun clips / of SNL, Norm McDonald as Burt Reynolds on Jeopardy, /young Will Ferrell bland as Trebek—I laughed, maybe”

“Close ups of the court, / our sneakers against the asphalt, / your fingertips stagnant.”

“We are sharing the big bathtub / of life, tan toes and blonde hair / snaking down the drain, pulling / at the pipework.”

“Remember when Mom sent us that travel UV, shaped like a dildo?”

“I’ll whisper the end of the love story I started / in 1993 and you can tell me about heaven”

“After watching Black Panther 2 / the man next to me sobs / each inhale heavy”

“ He showed me how to eat a tamarind pod. I told him I’d been drying seeds in the pandemic and asked if tamarind could grow up here. “I don’t know,” he said, “but if they can, it’ll take a couple of years.”

“If you’ve got the cash and can learn to squint your eyes just right, God can be as pink as cotton candy. Hell, God can even bend into a metonym for TV dinners.”