Simply absorb fluids. Keep your shit together.

The Terrible Softness of Tongues is up at Cleaver Magazine.

Her middle-finger emojis were swift

A new story, AN OCCURRENCE AT THE ONLY PLACE YOU'VE EVER KNOWN is up at the excellent Revolution John Magazine.  

Immigrants

Your immigrant grandmother

sipped the bones

                   of shorelines,

                       kneaded their 

splinters

into a faith

built on

a freak of nature.

Your immigrant grandfather

rejected legislated fun-bags,

plastic trees

and disaster relief,

yelled his mangled un-responses

in groves of goatees

                                 and Cadillacs.

Your immigrant uncle

          wore a belly full of corn syrup,

slid off 

his skin junkie’s charisma

into a Brownstone bowl

and buried it

with soft-boiled consequences.

Your immigrant mother

licked the cigarette’s copper coil,

           synchronized her lungs’ waste.

Beneath the branches

of a fire escape,

her breast curved

like a pomegranate.

Your immigrant brother

sees the reflective lights

of the helicopter’s ugly

bubble cockpit,

knows that

within certain limits,

the Moon is as imitated 

as a cop's fist.

My immigrant fingers

   hide behind a 

swelling glass abscess

                   

and next week’s podcast,

afraid to touch

this city

through an astronaut’s suit.

The Only Place pt2

She’d gotten his email address two or three months ago from the bottom of an article he’d published in an obscure site run by a former professor. Some barely serious, stoner-philosophizing drivel about the evolution of celebrity worship syndrome that focused on the potential illuminati symbolism of matching fingerless gloves worn by Beyoncé and Jay-Z at a diabetes fundraiser. She wrote to Roger about how she liked his acknowledging that the “legal framework in post-racial America relies on the myth that universally held racist concepts no longer exist,” and was especially impressed with his portrayal of Beyoncé, noting that it reminded her of “dat slutty girl who you keep around bc she's a hot mess and makes you feel better about your life and always has good stories bc she's a pathological liar - who i havent talked to since high school aka before she got married at age 18 to a guy who needed a visa and a jap to support him, just fb messaged me asking if she could use my email to send an email....????? because she lost her pw. wut?”

He’d given up actual psychological research as an undergrad, and writing was just an at-work hobby in the downtime between preparing invoices and market analyses, but it felt cool to have a fan. Even if she didn’t seem like the throws-panties-on-stage type. Even if she didn’t seem like any type.

Her name was Allison Anvil, which sounded like a proto-feminist but retroactively offensive comic book character, like her profile and online persona could actually be administered by a balding dweeb-turned-identity thief named Kevin trolling in his basement for passwords and social security numbers.

Roger knew she was real, though. As in, definitely not a dude.

Their exchanges followed a natural progression: gchats, texts, friend requests. Her mobile uploads and posting history formed a more or less complete depiction of her last five years, too thorough to be forged. There were throwback shots of high school beach trips, a blurry ride on Disney World teacups, split-screened celebrity lookalikes, vodka-happy off-campus posturing. Diatribes about Holocaust Remembrance Day and World of Warcraft. A Young Democrats dinner highlighted by a Bill Clinton handshake a cheek-nuzzle from an ex-boyfriend who Roger imagined looked kind of like a younger version of himself minus ~15 pounds of beer fat. And the most recent pics – an intentionally unflattering wedgie shot on a zip line in El Salvador, drinking simultaneously (with work colleagues?) from a mammoth bowl of neon-infused sludge, their duckfaces straw-induced and therefore acceptable.

The kind of stuff Roger imagined he’d see and read from Jocelyn – the neighbor who sometimes did her laundry at the same time as him in their building’s communal basement dungeon and, when she wasn’t buried in her phone, looked to be around the same age as Allison – if they’d been friends on Facebook or in reality.

Roger was a man who had done so much laundry.

He still lived in the first apartment he’d looked at on Craigslist, stayed put through several drug- or career-related roommate transitions and absurd rent increases, worked at the same firm where he’d started out even though he was mostly bored and there wasn’t much of a chance for upward mobility. He used the same hair product – “power putty for a windblown surfer look!” – long after his scraggly faux-surfer days had ceased. But in the seven years since he’d graduated and moved to New York, he’d allowed himself to be snared by commitment only once, and that was brief and mostly on Skype with a younger girl who was still at the school he’d gone to in Maryland, who couldn’t deal with the distance between them and her desire for at least two members of the ultimate frisbee team.

That someone so steeped in routine, who seemed to crave stability above all else, would remain single for so long was puzzling to the friends and coworkers who populated the periphery of Roger’s life. He wasn’t overly antisocial, didn’t suffer from a recurring skin condition or extraordinarily gross breath; he was no better or worse than the majority of his blue-collared-shirted and IPA-swilling comrades.

And there were girls. One or two a month, sometimes fewer during dry spells. Standard bar-hookups, Tinder dates, encounters at alumni functions. Connections that lasted a couple hours, or petered off after a few increasingly half-hearted (and foggier) mornings after. Companionship reduced to a series of exploits where the names had been redacted or forgotten, from the occasionally outrageous – the day trader who let him put it in her ass after he bought a $400 bottle of Grey Goose and told her his Kindle sales rivaled James Franco’s, the daddy-funded poet from whom he received a period blood mustache without proper warning and who later tried to cover up by asking he’d had a nosebleed – to the more pedestrian and sadder: a text-message moratorium, an unrequited friend request.

It wasn’t that he was incapable of reciprocating passion, that his shallow-seeming emotions were feigned and served an ulterior motive.

He was alone because above all else, Roger loved ideas.

Age seven or eight, he remembered sitting in Sunday school, listening to a watered-down version of Revelation, thrilled by the cartoon chaos it evoked. Afternoons, he would spend hours alone in his room, creating his own action-figure End of Days – Skeletor or Mumm-Ra as the Antichrist, Princess Leia and Wonder Woman as angelic mediators, Ninja Turtles as the Four Horsemen (duh). But a couple of years later, during a particularly rough stretch of summer that included the demise of a grandparent, a cat, and a Siamese fighting fish, death became something far more brutal and uncertain than the easy deus ex machina redemption found in swiftly dismembering a tiny villain’s plastic limbs. If there was a god, Roger no longer wanted to be a part of its ineptness.

Instead, he focused on another portal that was plastic and mostly reliable and seemingly infinite. A penetrable citadel of unsupervised mischief where age/sex/location was as malleable as his grasp of geography and his desire to blend in to whatever chatty den of liars and pedophiles he’d clicked into. His first girlfriend was ninety-eight percent instant messages and two percent hugs before and after school. When she broke up with him in-person a few days before the eighth grade semi-formal, using more words than she’d spoken to him in the past month, he was only shocked because her messages the previous evening had included the requisite number of extra vowels and exclamation points – byebyeee talk to u sooooon!!!! – to make it seem like everything was going smoothly.

High school nights, holed up in a parental home office suckling on filched Bacardi, he would scroll through his AIM contacts, initiating conversations with girls whose screen names he’d acquired in mostly sheepish exchanges or gleaned even more awkwardly from nonplussed friends. He devised and honed a system for gathering information, for establishing a connection that somehow seemed more meaningful because it usually played out on his own terms, the rehearsed-yet-casual sequences of manipulation that belied the painfully ordinary, pimple-skinned insecurity that consumed his non-typing life. He’d start with a simple, hi, hey, hello, wait for the nm u? response, and then it was on. After enough practice, it wasn’t difficult to always act interested and to keep the exchanges flowing with as little dead time as possible. The trick was in controlling the flow, carving its direction. If KatyKay40286 from French 201 complained about the frumpy patterns rimming her newly issued field hockey skirt, he would commiserate by mentioning how his water polo coach had screwed up everyone’s Speedo sizes – yea sucks its a little uh…tight hehe. After her expected LOLish response, he might conjecture that while he was certainly uncomfortable, it was probably nothing compared to the sports bras she was forced to endure (KatyKay40286 being a notable subject of bust-related speculation). If everything was progressing at an acceptable pace, Roger would suggest that they play The Question Game, basically formalizing what they’d already been doing. The only rules were that you had to alternate asking each other questions, one at a time, and that while the questions could be about anything, yes/no answers were strictly discouraged. The game would start innocently enough – what series of decisions do you think caused Mr. Neary to become the kind of teacher whose coffee mug reeks of Kahlua every first period? – but would quickly veer toward the quasi-erotic:

whats your favorite position?

how big is/are your [                ]?

The questions were tamer than much of what he’d encountered as a barely pubescent chat room devotee, but there was a thrill in the forging of textual intimacy, an arousal that was on par with what he imagined actual physical contact would elicit. If the girl got skittish and stopped playing or signed off before the game turned interesting, he could always resort to another less pleasurable, but not-without-its-merits hobby: scouring the streaming video landscape in order to check in on which of his favorite starlets – souls he felt he had grown to understand almost as well as the minds behind the screen names he hoarded – was farther along on the oft-tread path from casting couches and coy handjobs to triple penetration and rectal prolapse.

To an adult Roger, Allison was a welcome throwback to an almost-forgotten era, an aspect of himself that had once been indispensable. It wasn’t anything sexual; the need to fulfill unrequited horny-boy urges no longer existed. Instead, they traded some of the facts – her recent graduation from a small school in a rust-colored Pennsylvania city, his summer share house on Fire Island – and the obsessions – her resentment of a single-mother childhood and the sperm donation that led to her creation, his constant fear of colorectal cancer due to rye whiskey and chronic McDonald’s addiction – that comprised their inner and outer lives. She was fascinatingly ADHD, filterless, able to jump, in the space of a few lines, from her internship at a law firm where she was trying hard not to perpetuate “America’s meritocracy myth,” to her quest to scour the internet for the most awful sounding white baby names (my personal favorite so far is Kamdyn – murder capitol of new jersey), to delightfully random and gross conjectures: would you rather be murdered and have your corpse jizzed on by 1000 men while it lies at the bottom of a ditch OR your corpse + ditch + 1 man with a bucket of his semen that he has been storing for years OR 1000 women menstruate on you your corpse + ditch?

The best part was that for all she confessed, she never demanded equal revelations from him. She could discuss how her college roommate was a popular webcam model who got paid to play videogames in an elf costume and how sometimes Allison would play with herself and wipe her fingers on the plastic ears, or how her brief bulimia phase was so extreme that she wouldn’t go to class unless she was guaranteed a seat by the door and a bathroom/garbage bin was nearby, and Roger wouldn’t feel compelled to talk about how he cried every night for a couple years after he and some friends beat a pregnant squirrel to death with a nine iron or how he and his neighbor Timmy, before his mother found out about it, would take turns wiping themselves as part of a game they called “family time.” All he had to do was keep the conversation going with a word or two, feign the vaguest interest.

He would come home from work or the bar or wake up late on a weekend morning, turn on one of his devices, and know that in a few moments he would be inundated with the same pleasantly unchecked stream of Millennial pathos and pop culture:

-          ugh roggerrrrr im dying

i took a vicodin

but i just took it

whenever i get really bad insomnia i get scared that i've developed bipolar

because that's an early warning sign

and this is the age when people show their first symptoms

like stay awake for a week straight babbling like a homeless veteran

oh no. katy perry is back on Reddit.

save me from myself.

He could absorb her unique brand of damage until sated, take what he wanted and give back less.

-          Sounds awful :( I gotta pick up a jacket at the dry cleaner. Later

                              

After about a year Allison started trying to meet Roger in person. Initially it was subtle. She was thinking of staying at a friend’s in Brooklyn in two weekends, would he be around if they took a train into the city? She had to come in next Wednesday to get her passport renewed at a Midtown office that happened to be near where Roger worked, would he want to get smoothies?

Foiled by half a dozen limp excuses, she became painfully direct. They could hang out on his schedule. What weekends did he have free? When was she going to finally going to meet the roommate who used Febreze as body wash? She would have no problem sleeping on the couch as long as less than three sex offenders lived in his building.

Roger knew that it might go down like this, that she would eventually try to sabotage the idea of herself he had worked so hard to cultivate and maintain. He wasn’t skilled enough at Instagram to keep conjuring images of the imaginary places that coincided with his cop-outs, so he tried broaching the subject honestly.

-          Do you ever think that if we met in person it would ruin our internet bond?

its just that once you meet in person, that’s it, it's no longer an internet friendship and there's no turning back and reinternetizing it.

Her middle-finger emojis were swift, relentless.

He was selfish. He was a solipsist. He was needy and emotionally dependent. He was gross and old. He was too privileged to understand the consequences of cultural appropriation. He wore the same Third Eye Blind tee shirt in at least 15 of his pictures, none throwbacks.

Though Roger agreed with roughly two thirds of her accusations, he didn’t feel the sting of her absence until the third day of signed-off silence. His friends had left the bar and he had secured a reluctant seventh pint from Jessica, who knew his tipping calculations would begin to suffer greatly. He was looking at a Buzzfeed list of horrible sounding vegan Trader Joe’s products and wanted to text Allison the link. He tried thinking of someone else whose opinion about the article he would find interesting or worthwhile, and couldn’t. Least of all Jessica, who was viewing the possibly dwindling pile of singles in front of his beer with increasing trepidation. With Allison he could drink to the point of being a dickhead and send stupid shit to her and regardless of her response he would know that he was on the same wavelength with her for at least a few moments, what he imagined it would be like to have someone worth coming home to.

Now he was simply another lonely dick.

When she signed back on (heyyy dummy I still h8t you and im never coming to ny but hows ur week been??) he decided he would be more engaged, give a little more of himself, enough not to lose her again. Even if she only wanted to tell him about sending her ex-boyfriend pictures of her armpit stubble or her ideas about the patriarchy’s relationship to anti-Semitism that evolved into a treatise on the ineptness of female biology.

He would try.

-          if i could redesign lady parts, balls would be on the inside, as would clits, and there would be no vagina, just a little hole, covered by the labia. and nobody would have hair.

it would be like the iOS 11 of genitalia.

-          isnt that pretty much what a vag is

a hole covered by labia

-          no there's the other shit inside

i don't know what it's called

the labia minora!

-          idk i kind of like my genitalia

-          you're the only one.

the worst is when guys send dick pics.

like okay, i can tell if someone has a nice dick but i don't need to see a picture of it.

-          note to self do not send dick pics anymore

-          i'm not going to get off to a picture of an erect penis

-          lol

-          you would never send a dick pic

-          lol only if asked

-          send me one

thats what snapchat was made for

-          i dont have an erection tho

-          that and me sending pictures of my boobs with animal faces drawn on them

a new hobby of mine

how hard is it to get an erection? pun intended

-          very punny

-          now i'm inspired to send another boob animal

-          do it

-          not to you. i would only send it to you in exchange for a dick pic.

-          what about a soft dick pic

-          nope

-          haha ok

-          i just sent my friend a boob puppy.

-          are you going to have me arrested if i send one

-          no!

as long as you don't screenshot mine

-          i dont even know how to do that

He really didn’t know how, and wouldn’t have done it anyway. He wouldn’t piss her off again. But the reference to a relative state of permanence awoke in him a twinge of memory, an ugliness he tried to shake off while looking for his phone in the bowels of a clothes pile.

While Allison waited, faceless and soundless. 

How has it come to this, he would think, zoning on the pixels that flickered like a CAT scan from the screen on his blanket-covered stomach. Regardless of how hard I try, I can’t seem to keep my shit together.

Fundamentally, he knew you couldn’t keep any kind of shit together. Everything was carbon and particles smaller than carbon and those particles were always corroding, breaking, collapsing against each other with the terrible softness of tongues. A rapid, infinite sequence of shifts that were at once fragile and impenetrably brutal. If he felt an uncommon pang of irrational strength, he would try to fight the changes: he would dismantle his power cord, close the screen, his thoughts, his head, and for as long as he could, forget the events, faces, and hips that had come to define his particular disintegration.

He would stay in one place and keep staying still. He would hold his breath and try not to desire it.

Simply absorb fluids.

Keep your shit together.

The dense and desperate oscillations, though muffled, continued unabated, buzzing in directions he wasn’t even aware of, reminders of his task’s impossibility.

He would open his laptop and jerk off and sleep soundly. 

I Wanted to Go There

If X is the sum of two differentiating equations
and if I didn't write the answer in my graphing calculator
and if graphing calculators served a purpose
and if one of those purposes was paying my bills 
and if I sold my graphing calculator on eBay
and if I got enough money to pay my bills
and if I spent the money on a fifth and three dimebags
and if I got drunk
and if I got stoned
and if I got stoned
and if Mr. Jones shut off the water
and if Mr. Jones shut off the electricity 
and if Mr. Jones shut off the gas
and if I got stoned
and if my parents lived in Connecticut 
and if I took a Greyhound 
and if we saw a homeless black man passed out in the road
and if the kid next to me had an Incredible Hulk blanket
and if we stopped in Triangle, Virginia 
and if we stopped in Baltimore
and if we stopped in New York 
and if my parents were gone for the weekend
and if I got stoned
and if I slept on the couch in the T.V. room
and if I got drunk
and if I broke Dad's collection of 19th-century whiskey glasses
and if my parents came home while I was looking through their closets
and if I walked a half-mile to Grandma's condo
and if Grandma asked me why the trees look so big this year
and if the trees really do look so big this year
and if we're one happy family (sure we are)
and if they build a colony on the moon in 2024
and if I wanted to go there
and if the shuttle's cost was comparable to flying from Newark to Atlanta 
and if the density of atmosphere gradually decreases as the altitude increases
and if I got sick from space travel
and if I vomited on an astronaut
and if he hit the wrong button while cleaning his boots
and if we got sucked into a vacuum 
and if 'vacuum' didn't sound so slippery
and if there was no afterlife in space
and if that idea didn't sound so bad
and if most ideas don't sound so bad
and if ideas are combinations of words
and if words are more fun than calculus
then X equals 7. 


[originally appeared in the 2007 edition of The Messenger]

a river's perfect scar

Psyched that my smallish (~50pgs) book of drug poems, E is for Ether, will be published by Leaf Garden Press at some point in the future, if there is a future. Hopefully there is. 

There's a mist hanging over the forest

My story "Bodies" is in the latest issue of Literary Orphans.

no one hears me sing this song

It's kind of crazy to think that Weezer's Blue Album is 20 years old. Still my favorite album hands down, the second CD i ever bought at age 9 (after the seminal Please Hammer, Don't Hurt 'Em) because I'd seen the Buddy Holly music video and I liked the cover and my mom was cool with it because there wasn't a parental advisory sticker. I remember playing it in the living room, developing what would become some formidable air guitar and lip syncing skills, always starting with the opening catchy acoustic guitar jingle of "My Name is Jonas" and ending with "Only in Dream"'s nerdcore bombast. No tracks were ever skipped -- unless I had swim practice or someone was yelling at me because my Legos on the kitchen floor had become hazardous. I was too young to understand Rivers Cuomo's post-adolescent angst but there was an addictive power in the three-power-chord homilies, a seductive rebellion that drove me to learn drums and then guitar, that spurred my first attempts at songwriting and my eventual love of the written word. As I got older, middle school and high school, the lyrics became painfully and beautifully applicable, spoke to me as if in a mirror, because as many friends as I had, as successful as I was in school and sports and extracurriculars, I always felt like that lonely unrequited guy crafting odes to sadness and missed romantic opportunities in his garage, or like Rivers once said in an interview: "I've sold two million records, I've toured around the world singing in front of thousands of people. And there's a girl sitting across from me in English 101, and I just look up at her every once in a while and put my head back down. I'm still a pathetic fool. No matter how many records I sell, I'm never going to be in Kiss." I remember checking weezer.com relentlessly, praying that each subsequently released album would at least approach the Blue Album's perfection, and always being disappointed. Disappointment became acceptance one muggy July night in 2001 at the Meadows in Hartford when during a 20-minute encore performance of "Only In Dreams" I understood, after some beer tears, that nothing would ever be this good and that I needed to be thankful that something so powerful would always be a part of my life, would always remind me of simpler, better times. I didn't need to keep buying Weezer's crappy new albums, hoping in vain for something that would never happen again. Even though I did buy most of them. But in college, when my friend Adam and I would sit in parking lots on campus at night with nothing to do, jamming out to tunes in his car, the Blue Album, the entire Blue Album, was the first and only option. And it still is. Because I'm still a pathetic fool. Because sometimes I still hurt for the old times. Because I can never go home.

a specific number of quartz healing crystals

A story, "Either Way We're All Getting Eaten," is up at WhiskeyPaper.

A Second Chance

Full dick or get the fuck out.

He stared at the screen and absorbed Rita’s message, the acknowledgment of his cop-out deflating Roger’s confidence faster than the flushed, un-full dick that was still drooped sadly across his knuckles like an ulcer-prone salamander.

Drawing the blue alien thing/palm tree over it in the photo he’d sent her had been a stupid gamble, stupid enough for her to forgo an acronym and use proper punctuation in her response. He’d remembered her telling him about how she, before sending a pic, would sometimes doodle Pac-Man ghosts skirting across her cleavage, how she and her friends would turn their nipples into cute rabbit noses or penguin eyes or a “titmouse,” her favorite pun.

When he couldn’t find adequately flattering lighting in his bedroom or seated on the toilet, when he’d only managed to achieve the thin-blooded hard-on of a gun-shy high schooler, when he’d found it impossible, given the length of his arm, to get a proper dick selfie angle that wasn’t an anatomy-book close-up but didn’t provide too much unnecessary perspective, he’d decided to compromise. Life was compromise. A breast partially obscured by a stick-figure rendition of a woodland creature was still a breast. He could live with that.

He’d positioned himself at his computer desk, scrolled through a few of Rita’s newer college-age Facebook photos, worked himself to a state of slightly less embarrassing semi-stiffness, gripped the base, extended his phone-wielding arm and snapped. The image had been fuzzy, the lack of contrast between skin and white tee making for an indefinite, less than enthusiastic representation of an appendage that had been deemed above average – either tacitly or explicitly – by roughly half of those who’d seen it in its engorged majesty.

He’d used the app’s drawing tool to make a cobalt blue outline around the vital area, liberally expanding its parameters, then shading it in. He’d added green palm leaves or antennae on top of the head, and two eyes or coconuts about halfway down the shaft. Not bad, he’d thought. Whimsical even.

But there would be no reciprocation.

Doesn’t count since I can’t even see it.

are you racist against blue dicks?

No. a little. come on roger. Full dick or get the fuck out.

fine, fine.

Roger listened for noises beyond his locked door, hoping one of his roommates might need to borrow his laundry detergent or ask why the bottle of Lubriderm was missing from the bathroom. He glanced out his curtain-less window to see if any of the ambiguously Asian? guys doing construction on the (much shorter) adjacent building were having one of their frequent smoke breaks-slash-gawking sessions but the rooftop was empty except for a pair of plastic bags doing battle in the breeze. He remembered a movie from a while back where a weird dude filmed a similar scene and later told his equally weird girlfriend that it was the most beautiful thing he’d ever witnessed. To Roger, the twirling sacks reminded him of a vague sadness he couldn’t quite place, of hiding from something under the guise of total freedom.

More importantly, he had no excuses for Rita, whose ubiquitous emoticons had gone from tongue-flicking and joyous to now something that looked like a crying/barfing zombie.

Roger took a breath, removed his boxers for a second time. 

29@29: Albums

The Rentals // Return of the Rentals

Weezer // The Blue Album

Wu-Tang Clan // Enter the 36 Chambers

Atmosphere // God Loves Ugly

Cake // Fashion Nugget

Hum // Downward is Heavenward

Silver Jews // American Water

Diarrhea Planet // Loose Jewels

Weezer // Pinkerton

Styles P // A Gangster and a Gentleman

Stars // Set Yourself on Fire

New Radicals // Maybe You’ve Been Brainwashed Too

Billy Joel // Songs in the Attic

Perpetual Groove // Sweet Oblivious Antidote

The Flaming Lips // Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots

The Flaming Lips // The Soft Bulletin

The Smashing Pumpkins // Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness

Talking Heads // Stop Making Sense

David Bowie // The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars

Big L // The Big Picture

Michael Franti & Spearhead // Stay Human

Elton John // Goodbye Yellow Brick Road

Simple Kid // 1

Smog // Dongs of Sevotion

The Presidents of the United States of America // The Presidents of the United States of America

Blink-182 // The Mark, Tom and Travis Show

Grateful Dead // What a Long Strange Trip It’s Been

Alanis Morrisette // Jagged Little Pill

311 // 311

Famotidine

Ulcered and heaved,

your snap

out of it

snapped from the corners

bolts and sheets

and light of undone

white,

your angel forced

to pretend

what life might have

and somewhere

all your victims

and a plastic assailant

lurk.

Nothing defined,

the fog rolls out.

Silence

and windstorms

and emptiness blare

and throughout the albino prism

you find only

sawdusted anecdotes --

[You may have

any of the following:

Fruit juices (apple and grape

are good).

Clear soups or broth.

Clear gelatin.

Popsicles.

Avoid:

Alcohol.

Caffeinated drinks.

Dairy products.

Meat.

Other fatty foods.

Vitamins should be used

vitamins should be

started right away

you should be on

this diet

for a very short time

only when your

doctor

tells you to.]

Brittle over the

futon’s armrest

another brief, gentle

explosion

vague curses screeched

softer than

the sound

a decade sometimes

makes,

inclined to

the pale glaze

over your apartment’s

swallowing,

the last lonely chunk

of gut dissolves.

Take a glass, sip

sink your fear

neglect

your granular identity

your business

of dying

amounting to nothing.

Serve your greed

the gristled

shards of warm moon

burning above

the beautiful faithless

villages

your last winter

branch

ready to be

bludgeoned.

When it breaks

you will

grow

new limbs,

better than new.