a whole gigantic marching band, one that used to be louder than bulldozers, louder than  jets, louder than Aunt Catherine after three margaritas (no salt)

I hoped you’d grow into a southern red oak speaking of your roots and the struggle for sun.

I want a little more bureaucracy
in my horror.

Zach Braff is the perfect manic pixie dream boy
for any pet funeral, and yet, I suppose
he didn’t get the memo that he was meant

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to come down from the Garden State and do the honors.

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HALF PAST 11:00 sleeps in my bed and refuses to be

roused. I tuck the sheets in tight before I leave for work

At the dark sky campsite I put a red filter over my flashlight.

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He only allows my entrance to unbutton my dress
and form those animal poses. To be near him
is to be reduced to line

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Here,                         riding in a taxi on the Manhattan Bridge
late                            at night in a pit-pat drizzle,
everything                looks puffy from the back seat window

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Just under the browned swamp surface: a reaching
neck (not pictured). The edge of a stick (pictured).

The tiger makes it all so easy, the way it sweeps the woman’s house, packs a satsuma for her snack, accounts for the taxes.

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He was NBA-player height
converted to Judaism to marry

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And the town crier cries la localende! This is one of the stories where a stranger
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        comes to town. A stranger with a stranger tool.
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Come down from the hill freckled with mustard gesare. You know the stuff, Mara
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        how it explodes in middle spring.

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Don’t ever say
I didn’t see it
coming.  

which summer is this
             arithmetic is one thing, freckles another
                  power drags from the east in a late august storm

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reparations begin
   here,
within
    the body,   within
the striations of muscle
   to tendon, nerve to tissue

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