Life is a slip-on,
a nautical tassel loafer
that takes you gently
out to the shoal,
beyond the propeller
of the Silver Spray.
With your free hand,
you touch
biodiversity,
though it feels like
any other lake muck,
and you wonder
when the other shoe
will drop
into the water
to carry you home.

I got booed because I was dead.
It was the toughest convention I’d ever been to.
I vowed to never go to another, which was easy
because I was dead.
I packed up all my ice cream
but forgot to tell the trees
I was leaving on the next train, but it never
showed up. I was stuck here for quite some time,
doing laundry that wasn’t even mine.

Your season has begun,
but every worm in this tomato
lacks an essential kindness.

The sun is gritty
where it meets the sand
in your eyes.

I don’t know anything
but short days and a longing
for ice in every water.

Boys don’t wait
for girls who can’t do anything
and I’m not just talking about sex stuff
(but sometimes it was sex stuff)
if you can’t even go out
or whatever
and meanwhile the cool kids
(not the popular kids, the cool kids)
are all out going somewhere with coffee
or nowhere, or to Rocky Horror,
throwing bread and kissing each other,
pretending it’s all platonic
having a night
or one night after another
an unbroken string that goes on
while I sit on the couch
looking out at the street
where I’m not

Sir? Are you tending that fire?
I don’t think you’re allowed to do that.
The sprinklers don’t water the borrowed view
anymore; though some nights, there are lights on
inside the house. Meanwhile, my husband and I
continue our lives; he sometimes grills on our porch,
the flame apparently visible from the house,
that house, now haunted by her roses.