If I were with you on Christmas we would go sit on a low bank of the black muddy river, wondering why it’s so cold but not frozen. We’d drink hot chai tea with soymilk and share frosted secrets. You might say something like, “Ducks love to watch people in love sit on benches and throw stale bread into their reflections.” I would pinch your side and feel you rippling and think about how beautiful you’d look asleep with rose petals over your eyes or stars around your neck. Your breathing as my own, we’d exhale constellations and I’d say yours looks like a peacock. A snowflake might land on your nose and I’d think, hey maybe if it’s ok with the season I could kiss you and the world might still turn alright.

Wake Up Curious

Dripping from the rafters are
Bones flaunting for the eating
To dress with skin condiments
And call feisty lunch

A buckwheat heart
Hefty maple soaked

To eat like sex pastry

My Name is a Trophy

Evening love,

Blow that promise across bottle tops
I won’t take it as truth
Until a bottle top whispers

Drink up, My circulation’s harsh

Quarter atop walnut swivel stools
Your highness, so suitable for falling

I thought only of catching you
Of sweeping you away

The Device

You know when I lived as a catfish in the Nishnabotna
I would hold my breath as I swam past pipe fixtures
Even if they were just floating by
Lost limbs of the pesticide factory

My whiskers erect
There goes a threaded leg

Gasoline rainbows enshroud a 1912 T-model carcass
Coziest machine hosts a home collection of impaled worms

Catfish love crucifixions
I myself prefer funerals

Sharp dressed skeletons sway
Cinder blocks laced to their shiny black shoes

They say bridges are cliffs of hell
See their soggy faces
I chew their soggy eyes

A dead sex machine fell from one’s coat pocket
Rubber lust stuck in the mud
He always liked to deceive the people he loved

In Observation

The lunar lion sat, perched atop an exclusive hillside bordering a Neptune factory, my twin sister's doppelganger accompanied her. They ate pistachios and gossiped about amino acids.

Her innards spun like a flattening tire. She arrived to the party saddled aback an illiterate pony, escorted by an ebony swan; every time he quacked, it snowed.(One July, a group of children kidnapped him, demanding he chaperon a snowball fight.)They ate oysters and drank cocktails, then retired to the cemetery for an evening of granite and tears.

Impregnated and unaroused, the lunar lion rests in her olivine rocking chair, snorting cookie crumbs; her paper bicycle folds in the translucent rain. She picks up the telephone, though it's deaf, and tries to call me. I'm in the cupboard wearing my Hercules costume, drinking hydrogen peroxide, patronizing tea cups.

At the bottom of the sea there is an obese sea shell whose identity crisis provides her with the ego of a treasure chest. I stashed a love letter in her throat for you. Just ask her to sing.

The skull and flower preside at opposite ends of the table. Supper time. Forks have forged their identities. A vase stands centered. Did your mother pick those flowers? Or is that her skull? Either way, it's awfully thoughtful of her to flaunt her presence.

The cordless rang three times. Jupiter lit up in her eyelids like a dimmer light bulb. Four rings and God sneezes. A cue to end.