Witness my father who drives and hums the notes to a song I do not know and I

do not attempt to ask for fear that in asking he would stop

to explain, thus diminishing the magic of his throat as we travel along

After you died but before we buried you, during all the confusion, a fly infiltrated our house. Each comforting couch guest would mount their tears and launch into the death wake only to have their head harassed by the fly.

If you’re wearing a tee we would call vintage nowadays

perhaps with a pop star or soda brand brandished

across the chest, waiting with your brother-in-law

I watered a wilting succulent.

The sun had begun

to disappear behind

the apartments across the street.

Night 547

Silence pastures
great wounds here.
Aquinas
is one of them.

Someone asked if I served God

or mammon and I said

I’d go back and name the animals

if that could be allowed, slip among

Starlight and empty sidewalks, closed storefronts and cicadas,
when did I first define solitude as standing adjacent to objects

without touching? The streetlamps sputter Luna moths akimbo,
a frantic arousal, their rinse of wings.

I thought my body

a thick hearty thing, a big-

horn sheep perched in a crag

of rock, an elk

for Sarah Ghazal Ali

Days unclear, filled with sun. The flicker of another
life coming for me. Rushing

makes an imprint—bruised knees. Time purpling
the rhododendron. Near summer,

Translated out of the Old English, The Exeter Book, 10th c.

Often for this one,
alone, lost,

suffering lasts
god help me

Another name for nostalgia,

some kind of traffic

from yesterday, the way an argument

finds a nerve you didn’t think could exist,

I’m blood-hungry for touch,

ferocious in the body,

ferocious in my bones.

For Joshua

My nephew is uncoiling
a green garden hose
to sew the spring
together.

You meet a boy that gives you

reading assignments, leaf through Candide

and Slaughterhouse Five and 1984, biographies

of Morrison and Cobain and Clapton.

Only way is to fuck
like you’re stalling

the body’s departure
from doing

My grandmother had a list of things I couldn’t do. It was not a real list with faded ink on yellowed paper that she pulled out of an old, rusted briefcase, but a directory of interruptions, a bunch of dos and don’ts that, like speed bumps, stopped me from living freely.

To Jeremiah’s eyes, the word sat fat on the page like a bull amongst calves. But to Ms. Jones’s—blue and swift and confidently as they moved—it lay in wait like some snake in the grass. Jeremiah didn’t want to see her get bit.

She puts her eye to the window. It is bulletproof glass, papered over to block the harsh Angeleno sun and hide the iron bars that make the store look like a cage.

The emergency goes on, but no one believes her about it anymore. Mary waits in the ER waiting room every Thursday from noon—the elementary school’s early release hour—until the end of her mom’s shift at the coffee cart, one floor up.

The first dead body my son sees is a cat’s. It was in his favorite parking lot. Since the stay-at-home orders were put in place when the pandemic started, we no longer feel safe at Lindale Park, so we come here—the rough asphalt parking lot of St. Luke’s.