Neither my files nor I are lossless

Both my words and my illiterate love losing their shit

I intended a soft, true tongue to deliver it all

but it comes out with teeth

picketing an ever-grinding jaw

A Seven/Seven Happy Birthday to My Oldest Friend

Check my knees check my fingernails check my nose check my veins, spidering and varicose, check my ear: see that it’s to the speaker’s mouth. Check the smallness of my scale check the  mousy-brown roots of my hair check my jokes check my obsession. Check my air guitar check my bottom teeth my posture my running equally towards and from. Check my wingspan and my flight patterns and the worms that I find and the ones that find me.


Check to see my father there, so much the same but so much the better. Postscriptly check the above masterpiece. Dad, age 52. MS on Paint. I have been updated that my mother has banned the further e-dispersal of these such works in an attempt to thwart any fledgling thoughts among family that my father is going crazy. Fortunately, the artist and I have agreed to continue the exchange, no matter how black the market may get.

Happy Mother’s Day and How Does She Do It and How Does Anyone Do It?

The way you give your mother the cheek when she goes for the mouth.

The necessary retirement of her once irrefutable “Because I said so.”

The time she smelled your winter cap to make sure your hair still grew the same way.

The nights she wakes in terror, mistaking dreams of your death for premonitions of the same. 
The hesitant way her hand waves each time she sends you off into the freeway world.

The grey in her hair: how much of it was your doing?

That her back gave out, but she paid off your braces instead of ever standing comfortably again.

Her promise to never ask you for grandchildren.

That you were a bossy kid and a mean pre-teen. That she never publicly doubted that those qualities were merely phaseal.

That upper inner thigh freckle that she knows you have but that you yourself have never seen.

The chameleon blue that her eyes handed down to yours.

The way she lies in bed, no longer with a little you curled up in the crook of her knees.

The Christmases she and your father gift-wrapped in months worth of check stubs. The string-lit tree made of money that they didn't have.

That there are rapists and murderers and bad cops and good liars; that her baby girl lives among them.

The respect she had for you, even when you were half her size, even after you grew tall enough to look down on her.

That you and your brother came from her and that she came from you two, too.

The rules she didn't enforce. The way she trusted you to be a smart kid in a stupid world.

How she looks at you like you could disappear at any second and change everything.

Sun In

Over the last months, my skin went transparent. I showered, Picked ‘n Saved, and organized my dresser drawers for fun. Skipped social outings. Favored social innings: teaching the cat dog-tricks and answering my brother’s phone calls re:nothing, really. Five-three-two-one-two is set to thaw, and I forgot how manic my life will likely get.

Here in four season territory, we’re coming upon the summer binge. The forecast of fifty degrees F raises hopes. We see the bare-legged girls and understand their haste. We’re ready in the starting blocks, listening deeply for that pistol’s shot.

And it'll come. And it'll be loud. Because summer in Milwaukee is not pick-and-choose. It’s the year’s synesthetic quarter, everything-all-at-once. It’s a breeding ground, an all-out freckle fuck: new melanin babies born onto my nose every sunny day.

Maybe the anticipation is due to a long winter’s worth of hype, but let’s not be let down. Let the heat be medicinal. Or, at least, let it placebo affect us into believing that we’re on the mend. Okay? Ready?

ROFL

Missing my high school sweetheart after a short, short visit. Getting accustomed to loving people in two-hour funeral- or wedding-induced intervals. Looking back on days pre-bird-flipping, post-slumber-partying, mid-growing in pain.

Potatoes

Rihanna found love in a hopeless place. A place covered in tattered denim, needles, and drunk blood. I found it in Milwaukee, in the summer, where it’s hard to stay too sad for too long.  There was and is this guy, and he was and is an American Blondhair. I still can’t believe that people naturally sprout yellow from their heads. What a funny man whose hand to hold.

Lana’s pussy tastes like Pepsi cola. I don’t know what mine tastes like, but I’m nearly certain it’s nothing like high fructose corn syrup. Somebody would have said something by now.  

Queen Bey tried (and succeeded) to make three from that two, but I’m bi-annually staring at the bathroom tiles, test strip in hand, hoping that I’m not pissing for two. Consuming more than my fill at the dinner table, counting on luckless stars that I’m only eating for one. For one unusually hungry one.

Katy, forever sparkling, is coming at you like a dark horse, while millions of people are thinking about her tits. The only person thinking about my tits is my girl, worrying that they could house Cancer one day. Worrying about my skin and my brain. My heart, my bones, my susceptible little liver. The herd of upsets on our horizons aren’t sexy-scary. They’re plain-old-scary.

Miley came in, naked, like a wrecking ball. I came in naked, too, and surely demolished soft parts of my mother on the way. I seem to have slowed pretty quickly, though.  I live quietly. I spend my energy wisely on smart, kind, idea-filled friends and family. They swing, if at all, like slow, easy pendulums, always hovering around center.  They don’t plan to wreh-eh-eck me or I them.

The famed remainders, they’re on stage, basking in the lights, the tween obsession and the mom love, the deafening universal scream that rings from sold out city to sold out city. I am in a light peach haze because I just finished reading The Virgin Suicides. My vision is soft and my sounds are dumb. I think I’ll buy some ill-fitting white dresses and stop combing my hair, all in honor of fictional girls who were too hidden to survive. Spoiler alert.