When she is young, the name “Mary” is very common. If Social Security records for the ranked popularity of baby names in any given year went back to the first century, “Mary” would be number one on the list for hundreds of years. Sometimes, when she is meeting a person for the first time, they ask her if she likes her name. Sure, she replies. It turns out they usually have an aunt or a great-aunt, a teacher or a boss, named Mary of whom they are not very fond.

I get a haircut and scrub the stove, feeling unpeeled / from the old terror.

Take this cryptic correspondence as – a sound bite skirts my wonder.

we can all agree / no jobs for clouds / unconscious drifters

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he is remembered // like a stoic painting. it looms over / his organ, static from years // untouched, nesting nutcracker
 / and country hymnal.

As long as I have been old enough to understand what the middle class is, it has been described as “shrinking.”

Could I not want / the justice and / the sentence and / the jail of a goal?

In early May we are driving south from Phoenix on Interstate 10. The land in every direction is sparsely vegetated—saguaro cactus, organ pipe cholla, barrel cactus, and mesquite. Dust blows across this big sandbox. The sky is hazy. To the east, in the distance, are what appear to be massive heaps of dirt left over from some grand construction project gone wrong. But this is a trick of light.

You love to see it—discrete individual units realizing they are not / at all that. Like a grass field caught in wind, finally understanding / its purpose, I breathe with the sound of God breathing.

though I do // look pretty good / slung over // where a pair // of hot pink / fuzzy dice // used to hang—

only the two rocks holding each other know / where they find balance.

On my swallowed stone, I painted the weather inside a zebra stripe.

How the distances collapse when / moving at speed, several instances of relapse folded until one prolonged scene, an / abrupt start from sleep.

I had not yet labeled myself but felt the pull of men irresistible. I was drawn to a boy and examined every tether but the core one, that I wanted him to feel the same for me and I knew he didn’t. I spent the entirety of that year mourning our potential. I was prepared for Elegy Month.

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Shelly is fifteen years old, and she is alive today. Shelly is only sometimes alive. Sometimes she is dead.

No one said much / just / this makes virgins, that // makes pollution.

clean of me, my rod, / creel, sturdy / shoes, jack knife.

"Do you ever feel like/ you're just living/ the same day / over/ and over / and over again."

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But come on, even Eve ate a dead baby dino. / Adam was still munching on his apples like a dweeb.

After Graham stopped returning my texts, I started leaving little parts of myself all over the Internet. In his early twenties, especially, Graham left doorways to himself everywhere—not just the normal abandoned social portals of MySpace and Friendster, but also a blog with a cursor shaped like a hot pink mouth. When I clicked on an entry, the disembodied lips smacked. Sickened, I kept clicking as the computerized sucking noise pulled me into page after page of journal entries, photos, digital check-ins at bars where he’d time-stamped his arrival.

Call it oxymoron, where to shed is to gain worship, / polish escaping into the hidden temples of my teeth.

“atmospheric river” they say, as if we are children, / as if air was water, as if all was just one phase change away

You once said to me—as a joke, I suppose—that all your books are “brief, collaborative, and plagiarized,” but really what is the secret to your somewhat monomaniacal rate of production, especially the last decade?

The old men are unsure. Something is twisting up and up to become a stair. And what is the end for? Who would stop here and dream such accumulations? Once…

All day I have been sitting around / waiting to be thin. / There was a time I was more or less pure. / I still am...