POEM THAT WANTS TO KNOW IF WE NEED ANYTHING FROM THE STORE

Delores Grocery, pray stop
boasting about your

connections or enough
of your clients will begin

demanding a discount far deeper
than you can muster. Your brand

of whimsy
is unsexy, you don’t see

go-go dancers acting all whimsical
and what about their dinero

is the wrong 
color. Delores Grocery, please, I’m really

asking you. Delores Grocery,
I’m starting to worry

about your relationship
to capital—maybe only

because I’ve been reading Joshua Clover, 
but possibly you’ve been, too—

Delores Grocery, tell me
mind my business

and forgive me, I’ve never
even set foot in you.

SPEEDY

When burning guilt, add veracity.
I’m hopped up on enough adrenaline
that whatever creature’d

eat me’d spit me right back out.
Fussy engine, turn the paddle
that sends the boat slopping up-

stream to a back-home-beaconing
town of sleepy assassins. Dipshit
me, misinterpreter of yellow-light

patois; frugal you and other
interborough role-playoffs. What
makes an island: too few canoes.

EVACUATE THE PREMISE

Civilization on
a string sounds
more sinister

than “the world”
on same. Stuttering
is kisscousin

to an incantation,
one we shouted
when we came

to the creek
and found it
full of math

but not so good
for drinking. Es-
teemed accomplice,

much-lacked be-
loved, dearest
choice I didn’t

know I made,
favorite first
and finally most

vulnerable spot.
The trees release
their latent fire

at us; in photos
of lightning, see,
it eats upward, up.

CONTRA CARTOONS

Ugh, I ate a plate of bad faith
and now I like you enough
to embarrass me or anyone.
The newspickers gave us diddly today
so we got it from the firmament
the firmament carwash therapist deviled
eggs instead. Beginning of everything
but bigger. We tiny girls and smaller
boys, a cartoon cruelty we excelled at,
for the bible tells me no. Everything
bloomed childless while mosquitoes
clumped under pulpy clouds and trains
Doppler’d over molten fields.
Look at how cluelessly they wanted
us and how we were all we could
invent to kill ourself to sleep.
Someone improbable walks up
as another, impossible, pays off.
Plus my corruption, easy to predict;
o say can you have your sea and eat
it too. Cruelty: don’t understand it
but I should by now, I should;
nevertheless put the flag out: flap.