Academia is, you know, dizzying.

so much opportunity and no
specific idea what to do with it.
I was worrying yesterday then
Dad called. told me about buying pumpkins.
felt a weird homesick tug for new england
foliage and gourds.
stew leonards.
wait, fuck that now I remember:
autumn in high school: so self-aware
it hurts at football games,
who will keep the drugs in their glove compartment?

Things I think about when I'm kissing my boyfriend

the humidity
global warming
coney island closing
being buried alive
aristotle. the apple store in the
danbury fair mall. how many
calories are in a tomato?
sean ryan's car smells like
sour milk.
I hate my job. My mom is dead.
the cost of birth control. hot air
balloons. ap tests.
the haunted mansion at
disney world. watermelon seed
spitting contests.
where do people go when they die
shea stadium
my sister. how much do
stamps cost? Ikea. Chicago. tofu.

I can't sleep. My bones
jut out too much. At 1
am I am still fondling my
ribcage. The cars keep me up and
I'm counting my vertebrae. At 2
the street cleaner comes by. My
tailbone sticks out, a small
protruding nub, the rounded end
of a broomstick.
In the morning I will
stand under the shower I will
operate the faucet I will
wash my hair by touch because
my eyes will have been wiped navy
and black my
ears are ringing.
Is this the morning someone finds me,
warm and wet and naked? I will
wish this over and I will
wish it all over and I will
wish it was all over and I will
run my hands upon and
pinch my bones.

6/19/07

we have a love that ebbs and flows--
it's vicious,
seething, vicious. when he curves away from me
like a hip, like a road,
like a baseball pitch, he arcs away, tightens like
a coil in the corner of his room
with the deadbolt locked.
I wish I had a fucking deadbolt, wish that
he would follow me upstairs and
wait outside my door the way I wait
for him, recluse, sleeping always, but
most of all I wish the night I met him
I had just stayed in the car.

cancer spreads inside my mother like
some creature waking
and stretching its limbs. it started
in the center, liver,
galbladder, little barnicles clinging
on the inside of her abdomen then
uncurled, extended like fingers, unrolled like
tongues, rolls of tin foil and I
watched it fill her, stretch into
her ribs and spine and arms
and legs and behind her eyes to
settle in her head and bury little
timebombs in soft brain lobes.

my friend emily is

an astronaut in a future life and
the branches of some sweet dark soft
wooded tree and the
smell of the insides of ivory soap wrappers and
the way sun feels on your back and
the way wet sand feels in your feet and
the places between your toes and
she is snow in siberia and
she is rain in venezuela and
she is pocket change and icelandic glaciers
and cornflakes and
the spaces between
atoms bound to atoms bond to atoms and
the rough way leaves feel between your fingers