The first try I don’t inject the sperm. I hold your white-knuckled hand while the doctor spreads your legs. She smiles as she talks, pulling on her latex gloves and rolling over to you on her stool.

“The smart went west,” my grandmother liked to say. She and my grandfather left Kansas City when my mom was five and never looked back. My brother and sister-in-law, who live in San Diego, have an image on their wall of the California flag, the flag of the great Bear Republic—a sturdy brown bear painted on raw oak, the bear pacing, head down, nose forward, tracking the scent, heading west.

Begin with sound. Begin with light. Seidu Mohammed stands on the side of the road, unsure whether he is alive or dead. Beside him the frigid highway points back toward North Dakota—unbroken, unchanging.

Our plane had landed promptly at nine and outside the window, the world was black, but you could still see the mountain shadows, a nice reminder that there was dark and then there was dark. I sat in one of the sideways seats on the shuttle bus ride from Bozeman airport to the Holiday Inn.

They were lucky and spent the evening congratulating themselves for it. The bottom of July and here they were eating dinner outside—outside!—on a softly lit screen porch, raindrops pattering overhead, frogs in chorus in the wet dark beyond, this tail end of a quiet storm—a breeze, of all things, arrived like a stranger in the hot and humid week.

It’s that part of a Syrian wedding when the band has to entertain us while the bride and groom read the first verse from the Quran in front of the sheikh, before they join us in the reception. The drummer swaggers around collecting tips, while the keyboardist spins seemingly identical tunes of gypsy-flute.

If I ever have a kid one day—and who knows, because I hated being a kid myself, it’s all terror and being at the mercy of others—but if I ever do, I won’t deny it anything. I won’t go crazy and give it whatever it wants—that’s just as bad—but I won’t say no to TV or no to candy or no to going out or no to friends. Because that’s how you make a weirdo. Tell it no all the time.

Alex tells the arborist to fuck off, and then he takes his chainsaw and begins to cut down the dying spruce himself. First he climbs the tree with a ladder, and when the ladder isn’t tall enough, he scuttles upward using one of his dead wife Sharon’s belts, one of the sturdier ones from before her gastric bypass.

I am sure you have noticed it, too. People die

and the bereft go into strange quarantine. It is

not, of course, their grief we mean to contain,

sparing the frail and the hale alike. Even we

Listen, that ball looked like a pea to me coming in there once in a while.
Hell, no, I couldn't see the laces.
—Ted Williams

Hard task…to analyse the mind
—William Wordsworth

I was dressed in red, as if for Christmas.

A child like a ribbon of blood

unspooling into the gray room—

My father is a shaft of wheat.
Cut down and collected,

bound into the shape of a man.
Voodoo doll or corn-man,

He said it was like floating in color
then stepped into the purple air,

and we followed, you and I,
our shoes wrapped in paper booties, our minds

This time, the man said it was a subtle piece, and together we stepped
into the black box, our hands groping handrails, darkness so thick it
seemed to swallow us whole. And what is human instinct, really, if not
the deep-rooted panic that sets in when we lose our understanding of

As if she waded through brown rivers [ ] clawed
mountains down to valleys expecting something [ ]

potable, a rivulet of mother tears or lake [ ] of children’s,
as if she abandoned wide-open cage [ ] for cage, swollen

eventually, // unyoked from wire & // weed, muted to a noun that no

longer // wilds violently // against its box, like horses sleeping

through a barn fire, // like a fire that blackens not // a single rafter or

the dreams of // horses sleeping inside, the words we boys // hurt

I also love the art that fails. I love

the Shakespearean extra, doublet inset

with satin flames, loafing stage left

Working overtime for extra pay at least at the Grubhub

which was better than working at Jewel in the 80s punching

out and then working overtime for no pay he didn’t

explain why he never reported it he described being set

At my summer job on the dairy farm
where I work from 6am to 8pm

I swing my leg over the newborn bull
circle my arm around his neck this