Holly bleaches her eyebrows after work but before the half-grand, she lies about her flu shot and leans on one arm while he penetrates the rear, he sends her home to me half-dressed and with no tip. There’s never really a tip. The half-grand itself takes care of engrained service blues and devastation. Money’s always cold.

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There was spat of windshield time it’d remediate, and I sat in the corner of a dark and unfamiliar condominium kitchen with my toes curled over fingers, I sat and I decided on reconstitution. I’m sorry. It’s flat everywhere. It’s Utah gutted. It’s not worse.

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I trawl for the little girl, her proaction, her mouth and belly and blood. She’d speak her actions aloud to hear the sense in them, peel the skin of her lips and hold mouthfuls of water to distract her tongue. There’s not criticism, but patience. The taste’ll fade and the bowels will move, eventually. Patience, patience, she’ll forget, eventually. But I’ll remember.

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I can’t send you back. Say it again, one more time. I can’t send you back. Look up and say it again. I can’t send you back. Look with me, directly into the sun, look and say it again.

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They’ll pile over me, they’ll crush me to powder and I’ll be laughing, laughing. It’s all so funny, I know they know, because the feelings finally came. So far gone, so far past, we’d all thought they’d flurried to dust and spilled from pores yet — they came, all at once, all of it.

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No one’s got a face and everyone’s got an expression, with their hands and their tonalities, everyone’s got something to say and I wish I’d just die already. I call my brother once the dream’s up, recounting the bedlam and asking if he’d been to the grocery recently. He had, and got a new credit card, and asked if I remembered that day much. I said, It feels more like the dream than not, and he nodded his cheek to the receiver so I could hear it.

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She lent me Miracle of Birth: Vis Guide to Pregnancy and gave me their home phone number. Then nothing happened and my tummy didn’t get big and the lesbian had the boy and the wife wouldn’t make eye contact with me when I’d buy her kids’ lemonade and nobody called and now the boy’s kicking puppies and crushing beers and spitting on old people with his buddies down at U of I.

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you prefer to feel littler than I with little cotton eyelashes that coat my cheeks, because you can’t sit up without leaning into a breast and your mouth in its permanent O, o, oh God, you’ll sleep for years without me and wake up wet with spit, throwing yourself over the edge of our bed, my bed, yours, to cooler hardwood and women and seasons.

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There hadn’t been such a consistent row of roadblocks, not in those five or six years. Somehow we were still just as far from main roads. ‘Round a year past, he sent a letter with updates on his continental move, his engagement, the Jetta he finally sold, his newfound unemployment. I receive it on Earth Day. I cancel my flight West and drive instead, because I still have a car, and also a job. Ha-ha.

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we, he and I and a handful of latched strangers, knocked on a wooden door sure there’d come an answer and when there wasn’t, sat in layered clumps rolling cigarettes. I hadn’t done that before. I’d eaten plenty of dirt. Dust and dried chicken shit and something powdery and naturally orange that we smoked in those clumps, and it felt so smutty, all of us lying around in no certain veneration.

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Anyway, in the hallways, it begins wherever most narrow, our shared reluctance to speak; the sinewy fingers of baldcypress roots which pick at the meaty underbelly of John’s canoes, the inhuman horse whistles down the chute, water flow, lapping. I’d seen whitewaters, heard them from left, right, below, I’d beset louder with pressed knees — in the hallways, where bank strains its lips to press back together in silence, I fear it’ll swallow John’s canoes, fear it’ll ingest us all three.

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The sun’s out, you’re saying, we’re wasting time and money. Had I not washed out my line twice today — That is not very island time of you — I’d have a few words to say, but I’m tired and covered in grippy, fluid filled skin that squeaks in sunlight. It’s nice to lie down awhile, sometimes. I listen for lulls in the break, to hear you throwing coconuts around or pissing in the ocean.

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… standing in some kids’ puddle piss and wet t-shirt discharge thinking this and that and this and those recent nightmares where my teeth crumble and split into shards of fishbone and some odd summer smell from two years ago and which corner everyone’d turned off at and at which moment I had disunited to cling to some baseball fence with posters for lame players I didn’t fucking like and …

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Ten inches below, the swells fall softly, rhythmically, pressing against the padded bank in familiar tunes, creating an arch of space for the clinking to cut through. Buoy chains, trifold, clink against themselves within forty yards.

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Until the rock concert we spend eighty dollars on a missing link and jump the fence before God starts tuning and the hail fills our open mouths.

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The man in the jersey takes me on a date the following Thursday. We drive to Pasadena and eat lobster rolls from Maine. I ask the waitress if they have local fish and she tells me yes, every other thing on the menu. I ask why they chose to outsource their lobster. She looks at the jersey man and then back at me because he doesn’t really look like he thinks much at all. The waitress hates me.

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There’s a little orange tree fungus, or cascade of little orange tree fungi, most prominent in the winters of Vermont — fixed in wooded patches riding the base of the Green Mountains, it could be one of two dehisces. Witch’s butter, a medicinal [ see: edible ] jelly-like fungus said to improve respiratory health and attack parasitic tree fungi, or, an especially vivid case of beech bark disease.

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These eyes are black and full, well-rounded in the left and all stigmatism in the right, a slight circle of green, and he’s waiting. Who are you, then, he’s repeating himself, and for a moment I catch a waver; is it banter he seeks? A sexcapade amidst knee-length fiber crops, a woman with wispy stature and bloody legs, a modicum orgasm and hapless crapulence, his name serves him so well I could weep.

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I am speaking to a more disastrous being, or state of being, saying I miss time, I always will, saying it from my ears, leaking from my eyes and it’s a split tongue that snakes and darts with tides and moon cycles and vaginas.

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And Brendan chased me through the / Church with flowers from Jewel Osco / He caught me and I threw them  in / The trash once he’d driven off, / With Bronson and his Mom, / Ghost people with chasm cavities / My throat hasps to think of.

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