from the Jeopardy! Category, GOOGLISMS:
“is wrong is a guy thing is a radical notion in the Czech Republic is the future”
ABCs of Moments and Places I Threw Up Because I Didn’t Know I Was Allergic to Alcohol
“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”
The Rainbow-Maker
“His pigment box rattled. / His brushes bristled / in the morning sun. / Rain had come & gone.”
YOU’VE GOT A MATCH!
Are your friends writers as well? (is poetry all you talk about?) / Define friendship (my IG friends are closer to me than God)
Girls Bloom to Burn
“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.
watching skylines die or the taller our tombs
“I am reminded one morning in montparnasse cemetery / searching for markers in the fog with my new family”
Wish Upon a Bathsheba
“…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.”
Crueler Than Fiction
“ 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 dream my dad dies and no one finds him
“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”
Disappearance Riddle
“one line or two from poem. / use space slash space to indicate line breaks
Sleepless Elegy
“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”
Filming Rainbows
“Close ups of the court, / our sneakers against the asphalt, / your fingertips stagnant.”
Grief Assembly
“We are sharing the big bathtub / of life, tan toes and blonde hair / snaking down the drain, pulling / at the pipework.”
if I see you again
“I’ll whisper the end of the love story I started / in 1993 and you can tell me about heaven”
Without Sound
“After watching Black Panther 2 / the man next to me sobs / each inhale heavy”
Perimenopause
“ 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.”
In Which the Baby Bird Asks, Are You My Mother?
“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.”