VOICEMAIL POEMS

Get in vans with strangers: a Palo-Santo heavy Chevy G20 with a sonnet-spilling prophet; a red 70’s Volkswagen shaggin' wagon with three long-haired surfers headed South; a fuzzy pink and purple pimped out festival-goer’s fantasy stocked with the best candy—one taste and I make-out with God. Talk myself out of a felony on one side of the border, have my first lucid dream on the other. Skinny dip a...

"these days, everybody wants to hear the prophecies of yore at a mcdonald’s drive through, and i just don’t think that that’s what i’m after" & when my friend pulls up & the speaker starts crackling with some eldritch horror, & it asks, do you want to die with that? & my friend looks over at me & asks, well, do you? & i say i’m good with just the pepsi, thanks & the eldritch horror, profound & dec...

I dreamed of a canoe, and of the two of us: I was new on the lake. Streaming through the murk, the cellar scent of blue and brown water, and you, my new love, saying nothing, only rowing us backwards deftly. At the lake’s deepest point: a miniature goose—a full grown adult, though not five inches high, resting on an island of ice, mid-June. Tenderly I scooped it. Its feet were frozen in a lump of...

Chocolate Polynesian brown was beckoned to the land of the long white cloud to work in factories, freezing works, docks, was beckoned to work hard, send money back to islands of hibiscus and frangipani But chocolate Polynesian brown got swallowed, digested in a stomach churning with acid-filled hate The outcome? That other shade of brown // But dawn, because you covered your eyes with the dark han...

I studied Italian painters, Giorgione, Titian. At one job, I’m a glorified secretary. I answer the phone in my professional voice and sell gaudy urns to luxe addresses. My neighbor listens patiently, amused by my young life. We’re the only Black gay men in our building, so he has me over for Sunday tea. I fill our cups. For the heart, he says, adding whiskey to his. In the 80s, on a fellowship in...

so you do the next best thing and you cut your hair you follow a youtube video and a confident-man-hair-stylist-type shows you how using a mannequin head and swift movements on your turn you take two ponytails and the shittiest pair of scissors money can buy and you snip away at your kinda-long hair until it becomes less long and hopefully more shape arms overhead you’re diving into what no one ca...

People fell in love during the fall of the Roman Empire and people were falling in love in 1930s Germany, the Nazis were coming into power and regular German citizens were going on dates and falling in love. I have new tires on my car so I feel invincible driving to you through the snow, I am driving to you and a song is on the radio that reminds me of you and I’m passing all these other cars beca...

Dad was on the couch, mostly starving to death in front of us cancer, stage IV (for this type, many don’t catch the earlier stages, and of course there aren't later ones) we hung pinecone bird feeders close to the house, bringing Nature near when he couldn't go out we talked about our shared favorites: the praying mantis, female cardinal, blue herons, black cats we talked about Chris Christie taki...

Let’s be monsters. Let’s be witches and bitches and crones and just hideous. Let’s be powerful. Let’s take and take and take and grab the world, just fucking hold on with claws and teeth and refuse to let go. And let’s be gluttonous. Let’s devour. Let’s see what we want, what delights us, and let’s inhale it with no regard for propriety. With no regard for you. Let’s be insolent. Let’s be wanton....

Three weeks to Christmas. We bide our time on the line by conjuring posties of the past— side-burned and handcuffed, the ones in ‘81 who dared to defy back to work orders. Got the whole country maternity leave. Now we fight traffic in trucks that hit 40 degrees, deliver an endless stream of Sephora and Nespresso, spend hours alone with the clang of keys on metal, compete with the Amazon drivers fo...

if you are sad: sit, silent, and bathe in the brine of an olive jar. let the salt consume you till you are preserved in acidity rather than memory, and the blood in your veins might well be that of the ocean. if they ask you how it happened, say: “i didn’t know how to swim.” this is false, but so are the teeth they blatantly lie through. (you do not owe them the truth if they don’t give it to you....

Lake Berryessa, azure at our backs the man from Toluca slips me lozenges from under his tongue Spanish alive in my mouth touches the screen reaching deep lights from his phone plays me my first cumbia: chee chih chih woodsmoke unfurls decomposed flesh dusted bones awakening at his cue turning slight curving threaded magnets loop khee ki-ki khee ki-ki khee ki-ki each scratch of rake pulling me into...

"There is a look one sees, the mouth somehow desperate– … the fear of death, taking as its form dedication to hunger…" - Louise Glück b/c one day i will want for nothing b/c one day i will not want b/c one day i will need nothing to want for b/c one day my body will cease to function b/c one day my body will function outside itself b/c one day my body will cease functioning as a vessel for causele...

My dad died and sports came back. We wore masks at his funeral to avoid being next, I guess. The night before Joe Kelly fired at Carlos Correa’s head and cleared the bench and I get it, because what other response is there to feeling cheated than bearing witness to your hate blossoming from your body, your spite-filled fingers gripping the splitting seams, your hurtling release spitting seeds that...

You’re like a paragraph in a book, he says, folding a dollar bill into an origami ring at the bar, and I’m not sure if it’s an insult. He slips the ring onto my forefinger: don’t get too excited. Should I apologize to you or myself or the woman who loved him before? I stay for the story. He is the only one who can make me laugh during an argument. We huddle in the doorway of the pub, passing the v...

Double-check you have not morphed into wax. Are the appendages protruding from the trunk of your body still soft skin, or have you hardened your armor like they taught you in eighth grade when a car flattened your cat at your Christmas party? You cried. You watched as he twitched and his insides squelched onto the pavement, and when he became still, his body stiffened. Still, with tears, you haule...

When the blues find where I’ve been hiding, They pile on like puppies— so damn excited to see me. These days, I’m into cats, brother. You know, maybe one will rub up against me, once in awhile, or meow enough until I give it what it wants— usually my food and then, my appetite. But the dogs, man… they just don’t stop— yipping, nipping, slobbering— all fucking over me, and then I’m down for the thr...

My mother’s half brother wore a blue herringbone tweed jacket with padded elbows to her funeral / The kind worn by a caricature of a substitute teacher or traveling salesman or a freshly sober high school dropout / He told us to call him Uncle Loser & used to whisper to us in the back of his trailer the same three ghost stories every summer / The one about the man who underachieves his way back to...

They call one bulldagger. I heard them say she spreads women’s legs that's all she does, but I know her. She builds entire worlds where their mouths cannot go, their eyes cannot perceive. What they wonder is who she fucks and how they are going to have more children in the world, and there is more to loving a woman. I know because I hold them two inside. An elder called the bisexual one greedy, an...

I want to be: a good boy, your domesticated coyote. My tongue’s handwriting is the shape of your body unshaved and without a shower. They need us to feel disgusted with ourselves, so you commit to my appetite unreserved. You become tender only while listening to crust punk and letting my fingers impersonate what I really want. The moon is a cuck watching our disentanglement. I can’t remember if I...

I’m on the floor again, and that isn’t a metaphor for rock bottom. My new therapist asked me how I did it. How I managed to keep myself safe all these years. For the first time in over a decade, I was honest: I don’t remember. The meds are working, too, I think. Though after they unfurl my patterns, my dreams of precision, all the rot turns to tremors in my hands. It feels like the world ended whe...

We open with a stationary shot of me in my office, a pride flag on the wall behind me. An offscreen bonfire flickers in my eyes, and the savvy viewer will read this as a symbol of both passion and hunger, and before they can ask where it comes from I begin to speak: “I’m a therapist and community organizer living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, this is my audition video for Survivor in the form of a...

In August it’s hard not to want – everything heavy with it – ginkgo fruit rots on sidewalks, sweat falls down spines, the whole beast city breathes in smog and breathes out low clouds dropping lightning. Confused, a little, reading subway signs for revelation, it all comes up wonder – which pre-historic lizard dragged itself up into daylight just so you could buy Calvin Klein underwear and forget...

We learned to love the birds. The backyard bird with her black cap and white cheeks. The flicker so flirty in his polka dot dress and red scarf. The bus-stop-bird who mocked us each morning with a mixtape of songs by someone else. We learned to love the bones. The mismatched shingles on the mansard roof and the pumpkin-colored door. The wrought iron staircase and windflower wallpaper– the backdrop...

We failed, you & I, to care for plants we potted at the start of summer—lamb’s ear & lavender, one for each pocket. You told me you loved to stroke the soft fur of the hedgenettle & the smell of your hands upon pinching a switch of lavender & I said I loved our hands together, futuring something into soil. Then we failed in miniature each day, forgetting the attention required for something gentle...