Around the time that I had left my mother’s house to move in with Nick, I got a call from Lucy. This was the third of five instances in which I unsuccessfully left my mother’s home; invariably, I had to return after each landlord refused to renew the lease, which was almost always a direct result of the people I lived with spending all their money on booze and cigarettes instead of bills. However, my arrangement with Nick had yet to prove disastrous, and as I was preoccupied

that this morning I woke thinking of JonBenét because the news won’t let us let her go it’s the twentieth anniversary documentary I knew not to watch but did so I was thinking of her little face while getting high I knew I could have read an encyclopedia or gone for a run straight through the heartbeat of the city but I got stoned and made burnt coffee I looked out the window where trusted campus cops were parked a few houses down I thought of how the medical examiner found p

You wanted so badly to show me All of your brain tissue on that couch Sticky with tears on the television as It moved in the wind in front of us You spoke quietly and softly I watched It and you with no words the leaves Were carried away by the wind leaving The gray asphalt gray like your brain Now in front of me like your tears I thought it was beautiful and I sat Silently I knew you were trying so hard And it kept dancing in front of us Through the screen that r

I wrapped my son’s birthday gift In the cellophane of moths’ wings. It is fragile as the skin on his eyelids, As the chiffon of my wedding gown. My son cried when I flushed his fish. He spit his hatred in my eye. When did I become the grave digger, love taker? Maybe, it happened in that first moment of conception. I can conceive a little moth, Fluttering around the light of inadequacy. Packed school lunches and baskets of laundry— I tick them off my to-do list. My son stares

Buses are lonesome beasts. When there’s snow outside, the quiet is deadly. Once, I was small as a strawberry seed— The lines on the road slowly faded away. When there’s snow outside, the quiet is deadly. Three years, I drove alongside my mother. The lines on the road slowly faded away. Now, we can only make phone calls. Three years, I drove alongside my mother. When she sang little lullabies, I offered the harmony. Now, we can only make phone calls. I’ll hear her whe

I had just filled my head with cement, grey and cracked already under the pressure of, “Please, please, my parents are asleep— Don’t make any noise.” I shut my lips and followed him outside. “This way,” he said. “Follow me, this way.” My legs were wobbling but I stuck the course to his front porch—“Good girl,” He said to his ugly poodle, did not beg her to be quiet when she barked. We were stale in the five am quiet— the liquor I spilled earlier made my shirt stic