in Leatherpuss, Texas. I drink the whiskey                  God recommended             don’t swallow white pills.  Did you ever see the lassie                         tracing her bribe down the front of our the jack-in-the-box?            Our father dresses        her in a clownsuit                           so we see our excess our pigpen                   our playpen                  our hairy premise                         our dark [...]

Creation Myth “The stories concerning the origin of the word cocktail are nearly as many and varied as the mixtures themselves.”             —Thomas Mario, Playboy Bartender’s Guide   Forget the Southern sagas of Octelle, horses whose tails crooked to life with liquor, the Mexican yarn of Princess Coctel, and everything else you’ve heard. The first [...]

I see a photograph of your hands and grow irrational I loosen around life without you and that is okay and I excuse myself I tell a lot of people about the biology involved in finding other people about the comfort I take in an NPR article Do We Choose Our Friends Because They Share [...]

now and then a berceuse is caught between my incisors. in my neytal vein, i serenade duquende’s sepulchral howl. it has syllables like paper swans, it has a brimstone verse that stirs a controversy worthy of the most spanish red. you strip the winters blue skin off my lips in curls of chantilly lace. every [...]

Wet Trash Who wouldn’t love us when we floated in motel-pool phosphorescence, lit up like bones the flesh got soggy on, dropped off. Dad makes the last bed, doffs his fedora full of feathers he picked up off the interstate. Positively teeming. He plays pool. I play a Rich Bitch sucking candies. I leaf through [...]

At sea there are only lovers and their lack. Cracked stones, a rill of foam on reefs—always the hum of wanting, its sail-snap. In the old songs, there is a coming home, a looking across the waves’ thin-skimmed ridges, the sea conspiring with silt clouds. How, then, on the water— on the floating bar’s dull [...]

self-Portrait, after dinner no coffee yet but I’ll call you on metal stairs up from beechwood trees & I’m a pigeon in the rafters what do you mean a pigeon I mean strings whine into tall shadows wake up full, my dress unbuttons when laughs climb out & we should’ve asked for a carafe, the [...]