no matter why

or if, or in what way, what

I want to say is

Traveling with you is being hungry, always. We prowl the sites like jackals, waiting for our chance to jump. Hot, sugary churros chased down by beer after beer at the ancient bar behind the new colonialist temple, and the ruins of the older Aztec one where we ducked in to escape the rain and warm our July-cooled bones, and stayed until we were as dry and comfortable as the dogs we are, our conversation the only fire, and the music, and the only other people in the place another couple, she with heavy, tightly constrained hips and red, plum-red, hair.

“My boyfriend shows up at my apartment with his face made up like a hideous monster. It’s not Halloween, but he’s an amateur actor, so I’m more surprised than shocked.”

“A week after Mom leaves, Dad tells us to stop asking about her. A postcard arrives. We recognize Mom’s handwriting. Dad snatches it away.”

“I get to forty eight and stop counting. Laying each coat on the bed, shoulder to shoulder, they make a heaping, unruly camel’s back that could topple over at any moment. Again and again I return to the closet, lift out a different coat, search all the pockets, drop the hanger in the bag and spread it on the pile.”

“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”

“I thought they were rocks, but they’re turtles, moving slowly over one another to sun. Stretching out their gray necks. There’s a man behind me saying, ‘did you get one of these?’ to passersby and holding out a pamphlet titled Are You a Good Person?”

“At thirteen, she’d stepped out of the forest into a place where the water was a solid sheet of green.  She was trusting then –innocent of what the color meant.”

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

“According to your back story, you have two sons. Kevin, who's eleven, right? And Keith who's fourteen. So it's Keith and his friend from next door. Uh..."Tadpole" is his name.”

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

“My uncle drinks, my mother worries. They put me in the middle, use me as a topicof conversation when things get dull. They send me letters and out-of-print copies of their favorite books with thoughtful inscriptions.”

“Every day, people came in and pawned a piece of their lives to keep living. Sometimes they bought it back. Sometimes they didn’t. But I always saw them again.”

“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.

“That’s when Nadine started to act as though she were built superior, even though she didn’t have the widest hips, hadn’t even shown that much before he was born, her stomach more of a suggestion than an assertion of pregnancy.”

“Form 4: Self-Care Checklist

Instructions: as a new mom it is very important for you to take self-care seriously. Please mark each form of self-care you participate in. Please see footnotes for extra detail:”

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

“‘You don’t have to say anything.’ The blue heron is picking its way through the shallows, and they watch him finding his food. Charles said, ‘There was one time I had to kill a man with a knife.’”

“…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.”