Explore Poems: Living

Monday and it starts out mobile
Monday you can picture “health”
the picture is a stucco villa
shining…

of time, of course, sliced inwardly;
no matter how brief the moment,
halve it again, and the endlessness…

Pretend you are a potato
& hide in a sack
peek at the earth through a hole
while they are carrying you
from the garden to the cellar...

After my limbs retreat into their sockets
again, my spine slips its discs
back into pain’s fist until…

It was a shit shift.
            You served a salmon roll
                         to someone allergic.

Sat with simultaneous eight-tops,
            you cursed your lack of an addy. The boss

Alana whips us 
around the night
in her nineties jalopy.
On the rearview,
a rosary sways.
Our clique’s the…

I remember that jasmine bush. 

But I’d forgotten the yellow couch.

I can’t bear our small faces in the…

When my grandfather was on his deathbed, he didn’t
move toward the light. At his feet, there were four…

I am pleased I will soon die and with me the pressing need to make a terrible, terribly poignant film…

i

Вдавати що ти картопля
ховатися в мішок
дивитися на світ крізь дірочку
доки тебе несуть із город…

Look at a painting of sky. Look 
a long time and notice one thing.
How someone’s wet eye stares back
like…

The cloud casts a shadow on the mountain. 
A sentence comes like code, long after
the image, which is …

It’s easy to conflate whiteness with having an easy life, so you sometimes mistake the tall white man…

After reading my obituary
folks went to their local bookstores
looking for my books. For a few days…

Even weeks after you went, they came:
Frontgate, Fresh Finds, Hearthsong—the names blurring,
the smiling…

Keyed up after a sleepless flight,
we stared at the Place de la Comédie:
the stone Graces glowing pink…

That two shells could be connected at their centers is a new thought I’ve never had. The way the canvas with its colors now turns into cubes. My life has been livid with itself for too long.

Before I was born, my mother says, there was another boy. My brother. One day, half-asleep during lunch…

our vow—
if vowless by thirty
then us

was such
a stupid, childish way
to say love.

but love we were…

I want to ask you if you ever wanted to leave.
If you can see yourself living somewhere other than here…