Immediate green heat,
highway sounds

far away and closer.
Dull scudding

leaf of last season,
bright new growth

on old hedge, rampant 
violets, flattened triangular

Drumstick wrapper.
Small kicks to

my left hand
here, baby.

Cold pink of impatiens.
A moment of silence

for what I once wanted so badly
now don't out of habit—

a rabbit's foot to hold
in my pocket and pet

a grassy quadrangle,
sugar cereal.

*

What you see
what you get—this

unraveled acronym—
it's important

to find your place in the world.
Bad things are happening

everywhere to good people:
an obscure volcano

grounding starlets in Europe,
Port-au-Prince flattened on TV, 

I'm too close to the screen, 
while on the other side of

the roof and the trees, the stars
are lost baby teeth, milk-whet

incisors of finity—
yes, let's 

make it 
mean that.

*

Don't write about children.
Don't write about dying

parents or war or jasmine.
Don't write about Christmas

or siblings—they suggest
the non-subjective parts. 

But the world is round
and navigable.

To play it like a theremin
or it plays me—the big screen

a Van de Graaff machine
conducting to the follicles. 

A warm, late-June afternoon
before the turning electric fan 

the air is thick and visible,
thickening with electricity, 

your eyes flicker behind 
your lids while you sleep.

Horripilation: again, I'm stricken
how some things can only be said.

*

If the sky solidified
and rained pieces of

itself—broken blue
colorways of water—

what would scream
into the abhorrent

vacuum? The air
apparent is infinite

and invisible. Everything 
is already exhausted

the fourth day of August. 
Weeds, skirts gone limp 

and dingy with humidity, 
the great displacer.

If I could empty myself
of self and be your shell

what would step up
in my stead? Crickets.

There are sets within
sets of themselves.