Poetry

When the seats fill up, he shakes everyone’s hand, listens, hears, blesses with no judgement. When the seats empty, he stays seated, removes his collar and gown, stashes them and waits an hour until the banner switches, one more sign:…

my pussy hurts. Like it’s been kicked. Cunt feels too tough. It’d never admit to feeling pain. Vagina’s imprecise

Soft jingle of chimes, feet wiped clean at the door.

Crumbs — all that’s left of my coffee cake. Plates clatter as they’re loaded in the dishwasher. Ashtrays on the bar. When Hopper painted Nighthawks he didn’t intend to evoke loneliness —a waiter, two men in suits, a woman considering…

A spell, he says, made for a man who wanted a woman who did not want him.

Glory to the waiting rooms, clipboards like tombstones. Doctors carving diagnoses into her chest: obese. unwoman. deviant. Praise the paper gowns, thin veils for the body’s indictment.

I tend not to know how to say when it hurts. Firstly, I don’t know what it is. I wait for the call and no doctor rings. Wait, then, some more.

I learned from my mother, passed down from her mother, how to hold inside me a great ocean of sadness because the world is a cruel and inhospitable place. At the age of fifteen, I first told her I didn’t…

A horse who cannot run is just the fallacy of a horse. Most nights, I shovel familiar names into my mouth like lovers,

love. Even if I do love, I will never marry. Even if I do marry, it won’t

You hit the jackpot and I was angry at you. Lucky, lucky you. I forgot about your mother’s tumor, the fingertip edging the light switch of her pituitary gland.

Forgive yourself. If it’s hard, start small: throwaway thing you said in passing that’s kept you sheet-thrashing all night. Stack of coupons you let expire; waves uncaught when you came in early despite offshore wind.