AUTHOR’S NOTE: These are found poems for which I used the January 2020 issue of O Magazine as my source material. For each poem, I would start with a word or short phrase, then move forward until I found a new word or phrase that joined it in an interesting way, and keep going until I had a good title. Then I would do the same with the poem, stitching on a new word or phrase at a time until the poem seemed complete. The movement was always forward rather than either backward or scrambled, and my aim was for each poem to be something more than just an assemblage of its parts.

Cultivate Your Breath

You might be open to the pressure of your skin.
Naturally, the vacillation captured your attention—
it starts to get gnarly, overwhelming, the fatigue.

Dying, some people use amphetamines, but I have to
take ten years, scream…