after Petrarch 

 
So long I have been dwelling in a place  
of too much     potential,     my thoughts,  
scattered, my footsteps circling a grandiose  
mudroom,     anxious to find something  
worshipful. It is nice to have fingers  
and defenses,     a few words I can swallow 
in neat, little capsules when enemy forces  
surround the abandoned tannery.     It’s time, 
you say, for my hiding,     so I pop open the laptop 
and dim the sky’s blue for my eyes’ sake. 
The problem is you are always changing. 
I cannot properly obsess.     One second  
you’re peddling Dr. Squatch bodywash  
as Sydney Sweeney the next chopping  
cilantro seductively for 64k samba-loving 
followers.     Remember when muses were  
decent enough to sear a singular image  
in the mind? Standing in the center     
of the coliseum, wearing nothing but Adidas  
flip flops,     I listen for chariots and clashing 
steel and the turning of ambivalent  
thumbs, but hear only the humdrum buzz  
of hive minds insisting I upload you to 
a flash drive.     There is the thing and the thought 
of the thing.     There are bodies that piece  
themselves together from shredded blazons  
then throw on a sexy nurse costume 
and go trick or treating.     Like cupid,      the ads know 
their target and the algorithm is quiver happy: 
Bullseye!     Pied pipers,     content moderators 
of the 4chan Roman forum,     I have not come here 
to pin my sweet accents on a patsy.  
The people need to know how I feel under 
all this flambéd desire. If I’m absent from  
posterity,     assume I’ve been shadow-banned. 

The grove swallows me whole. Kudzu fastens  
itself to my back  
like a Ferrari abandoned in Appalachia. It’s self- 

serving, wish fulfillment, this story  
is the story  
that makes stories possible, necessitates  

itself. I’m not trying to say Sully Sullenberger  
isn’t special, but Jesus  
walked on water and The Divine Edgar trapped  

waterfalls of whiskey in his gullet. It’s a matter 
of perspective, the wife 
takes up a knife after years of carrying bruises  

under camisoles and turtlenecks. The cop 
finds his finger wrapped 
around another’s trigger. Blame the husband.  

The hot sand. Blame time. There’s almost  
something spiritual  
about the sound of this place, rain  

in torrents at the city’s gates—three men— 
woodcutter,  
commoner, priest, sort it all out, but still,  

it’s hard to have hope. A bell welcomes me 
to the deli, I grab  
a bag of Fritos and ask, who will drive the stake 

through my heart today?

‍

I never wrote a poem about Honey Boo Boo,  
and now I regret it. Timeliness is not 
my forte. I spent a full decade  
wanting a Razor scooter and  
kicking rocks. Then I wrote  
poems about comets 
and caverns and realizations 
refracting in a river’s current. 
There was no Furby turned oracle 
in my closet, or Thor swinging 
his hammer right into my eyes 
as I sucked a Milk Dud sweet. 
It’s always been, for me, bland eternity. 
A stone that comprehends no when,  
grows smooth out of sheer boredom,  
but not perfectly, not with battery-operated  
sentience, not like a Tamagotchi. 

I’ve heard the gossip, the chastizing 
aproned whispers of tongue-tied lives fixed 

to a warm plum pudding. Their tisk-tisk flicked 
at your roving hands caressing black and white 

notes, your strapless velvet dress, your fine- 
tuned perfume luring leading men to their doom. 

What do they know of your low key world  
awash in deep shadow and harsh light? 

Double-crossing dame, redeemable dipsomaniac, 
why does the mise-en-scene single you out?  

Why must you pay for the flaccid schemes 
of has-beens and statesmen, shady casting 

agents who would box you like a stock character 
in a warehouse? Lithe legs, punishable pout, 

it’s clear why you want out, why you fold  
yourself into pool hall and flophouse then soiree  

with senators at the gala. Why with coquettish  
prowess, you concoct a tempting alibi for the P.I.  

behind a dirty martini. Pent up in the penthouse,  
slipping into something unseemly, you endeavor 

to tread on a man’s lust; Stanwyck ice pick, cold  
and promiscuous, shaping your pragmatic  

shadow into a blushing disguise.

after Virginia Woolf’s Orlando  

a pocket knife, a patch of grass on an otherwise  
fallow field, a foreign emissary, a scowl on the face 
of an infant. He called her a thoroughbred, an hourglass,  
a master calligrapher with an instinctive feel for how  
ink should exorcise itself from pen. In short,  

she was a predicament, an innuendo, a steamboat 
caught with its pants down: half curtesy, half fire 
-fly, he liked to watch her writhe light over an uneven  
countryside. He called her a pincushion, a cast-iron  
skillet, a maple-scented candle with a mind of amber  

and patricide. Darling dear, oh my lovely, bright-eyed 
shotgun. Zipper, zipper, you lewd metal tongue. He’d call her 
and call her, but she didn’t seem to listen, enamored 
as she was with the obliteration of time, the splitting 
of the atom, the barren cries of nature from its plush 

pink throne. She had better things to do, hemispheres 
away. She could canoe over the corpus callosum to  
the right side of the brain and be free of his throbbing  
microscope and panoply of objective lenses scorching 
down like a noontime scowl. Here, she sits, in decadent  

disarray, mascara smudged on a queenly cheek, quiet 
coiled in her collarbone. Let Freud interpret her choice 
of cocktail. Let Lacan find her a mirror to mimic 
man with his bulge and bellowing windpipe. She 
can cut a cigar without castrative impulse. He tried  

his hardest to put her into words while they scurried 
to the corners of pages, pursued the subtle grace  
of marginalia as she colonized the curled ends of her  
thoughts with a shawl. As she noticed how lively  
the soil after a forest fire.  A proprietor of ample rot,  

a browbeaten daydream, an obscene seamstress threading  
one moment to the next as if such vicissitudes were bent  
on sense, she might wear these names when she chooses.  

making the elegy all about himself, as if he 
were the one to drink his liver  
into oblivion without so much 
as a Pushcart to show for it. He  
is only half as pathetic as he 
makes himself out to be (the 
deceased), whispering sweet 

nothings to his new bride (the dirt) 
while she nods her many meal- 
worm heads to their soft rhythms. He can’t 
(both of them now) keep going on 
about death like this, it’s 
indulgent, it’s low-hanging (overripe, 
now rotting) fruit. It’s so pregnant
(aborted) with self-doubt and ego, which is 

a gross balance to achieve.  
I don’t envy him (anyone).