in her mouth, a song picked up at the company store

the cocooned hidden heart hanging

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

The #MeToo movement sweeps through the academy, then through American Buddhism, and back.

O sleepless wives of Mount Sinai, do you fear your dangerous proximity to the sun?

In the dream I bury my father in the swamps of Florida, that empire of shithead tourists.

O father, O hunter, bury me in the casket of your eye. Tonight I sleep against a pile of survey stakes

Zoning tape and timber ruins in a landscape: how pretty goes the night, how pretty go the stars like a thousand cigarettes thrown from the hand of a diesel truck driver speeding down one of America’s gutted highways.

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

I’m as black as they
I’m your trophy
above the mantle

I know it’s unfathomable to see
after the way we’ve anointed him
patron saint of peace
prophet of nonviolence

like the mushroom cloud
that follows mankinds’ greatest foible
all the rouge neutrons
the atomic sun abomination

The viper pit discovers its arms,
slaps and grabs. Sibilant lout-suave words. Once, Haze got moccasin-bit
as a child—she still tastes venom in her mouth

If a man offers to help you
carry something heavy to your car
flex your biceps and say no thanks.

Here is a grain of salt, a pocket full of posies, ashes,
crumbs for retracing our steps (if only we could), or better

In a nearby field, the cherry trees
go dizzy with their own sweet juice,
get drunk on their own bloodstream.

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

never thought I would wait
here, silently keening, prayers
etched into my hands.

it occurs to me now that two hands
holding each other almost make a wing

OK, so they were right: it’s not financially viable. We put an ad in the local paper, but no one has any interest in purchasing our Franco-Austrian cloud machines.