In Clark County, Washington – Oregon with a sales tax – the measles are back like jazz standards.

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did they forget
the vibration
of our throats
humming
in the shade?

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The pistol shakes in the sheriff’s right hand when he hauls me in for trespassing. O father, I have never seen your face.

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O hunter, I was wrong: I want my casket made of particleboard.

Listen: nobody photographs the moss-smothered trees in the swamps of Florida, not when traffic’s gridlocked on the bridge and the tour of the Spanish monastery starts in an hour.

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O sleepless wives of Mount Sinai, do you fear your dangerous proximity to the sun? The last strip mall in Kansas closes down with little fanfare, and this October night’s unseasonal heat touches me deeply.

I know it’s unfathomable to see
after the way we’ve anointed him
patron saint of peace
prophet of nonviolence
priest of martyrs sitting
at the right hand of Jesus

Grip the neck of
this coveted steel
I'm your dirty letters
and naughty numbers

Orange [a president...
…and now a vice-president
who just got the taste of segregation
out of his mouth after fifty years
sweeps through South Carolina
with Clyburn at his right hand

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Here is a grain of salt, a pocket full of posies, ashes,
crumbs for retracing our steps...

If a man pulls up next to you in his car
pants unzipped and hand jouncing,
fly like a bird in the other direction.

Haze knows about slapping tables, a practiced slapping. Some nights,
if need be, she backhands all the serpents gathered around her, hissing...

i am the concave ash center
the ground-down dredges
of what happened before you got here

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Princess Di looked best in bicycle shorts,
carnations are to prom as shame is to sex, &
everything tastes better with garlic.

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even with a passport, I must
stand at the back fence
of lost desires.