I think I’ve written the last poem
         Of my book, which doesn’t yet exist
               (the book, not the poem, which exists
        I swear to you) it’s about longing
(the poem) and its tricks
         This morning my roommate Nola got me a biscuit
               biscuit from the place I like
         Brown Butter and now she is in this poem
See how easy it is to get in a poem
         ll you need is to gift me a biscuit
               And have a name that is also a city
         This year no friends can come to my party
Because of covid which if you are reading this
         In 40 years which is the plan
               You might not know what that is
         Or you know because it’s happened again
And again and again and again and again​
         I lost my wallet today
               Today’s to-do list is

                              Find my wallet
                              Cut my nails
                              Get pretty
                              Make a salad
                              Fuck

               “Ok I found my wallet” she said
         You write your world how you want it
She cut her nails with trembling hands
         Did you know you can become an I
               Or a they or a he or a she
         In just one line one word even
You can be anyone I can be anyone
         relief to step outside and look
               That body’s not a body “when i was a boy”
         Said Frank “I stepped into the sky/ and I was a boy/”
Said Frank “not a surrealist!// part of the dream / is that you accept/
         Your waking life as/ part of the dream”
               You don’t need to get too sad
         You can anyways become Frank
Or a girl or I so the biscuit
         I’m saving that for tomorrow
               You can come too you’re invited
         We will have a party
A virtual party
         We are all a little sad
               Ok a lot sad all of my friends who can are trying
         To fight fascism and those who can’t
Are trying Never Again is Now is what we’re saying
         To be White is to get to write this
               Not enough nouns here where do the flowers go
         The bouquet from the farm the farm the dirt
The man the we the I now that I’m 30
         The kids are asking what do we do
               Now that never again is now Grab the nouns
         I say The Biscuit I say
The Salad the Fingernail the Flower the Farm the Dirt
         If fuck were a noun i’d say grab that too The Moon
               we all can see grab it the all
         Can see the hopeful see the hopeful all
Find all the nouns you love and hold them
         Hold all the nouns you love

‍

Note: quotes by “Frank” are from The Book of Frank by CA Conrad

The lab tech at Quest Diagnostics apologizes,
answers her phone. I– forearm naked on the table –
listen: her teenage daughter requests pickup. School exposure.

Last summer – the first summer – walking through my childhood
neighborhood: a cartoonish red wheelbarrow, freshly painted on a lawn.
William Carlos Williams was also a doctor.

My mother, a doctor, writes tankas in retirement,
sends me pictures of hummingbirds suspended at the feeder,
yellow beaks sharp as needles, wings a blurred suggestion.

At the start, she floated volunteering at a make-shift clinic.
Just transport, she’d assured of her role at the proposed hospital-
on-the-track-field, gurneys rolling over green below former freshman dorms.

I snapped a picture of that wheelbarrow, showed her. I understand a desire
to help, I said. To feel less helpless. Us around the dinner table, dad’s frittata
and he agreed. I soon changed my mind

and anyways they didn’t, after all, need the overflow space.
You’ve paid your dues, friends told me to tell her, friends furloughed
from their known lives. And mine – alone in my parents’ basement,

unable to leave (like a young child) except for weekly clinic trips for IV saline.
Mom and dad didn’t want me to get them, the infusions,
fearing I’d bring home the unspeakable

from fellow (surely viral) patients in the waiting room.
All six feet away in every direction. Every Wednesday I’d drive
dad’s Subaru to that sole urgent care in town willing to administer IVs. I liked the nurse

who always checked me in. They didn’t take out of state Medicaid
so she gave me a discount, practically radical in light of the $200
per clear liter charged at the nearby IV wellness centers

popping up all over town. Feel better, girl,
‍she’d said upon my final infusion before moving back to the city,
her blue-gloved hands stretched through two surgical gowns, face double-

masked and goggled, hair blue-capped under a plastic shield.
I know she had two young girls at home, no vaccine yet
and even when, still a decade too young.
                            Get well soon.

Though more accurate would be behind the house,
‍I would call it my backyard, the river –
what I will most miss.

And the blackberry tangles alongside the road,
taunting ripeness for that one week in July
before disappearing for another year.

None of this is lost, but nothing’s right here.
It is increasingly apparent that right here
‍is a prerequisite for care.

Aphantasia is where you can’t picture a thing
when you close your eyes and are prompted
to picture it. See star. See apple. See mother’s

hands. How do I know if I can picture a thing
if what happens in my mind, when prompted
to do so, is all I’ve ever known?

after Ocean Vuong

because no one told us

we could pour

this decade-long night

into our stranded bodies

and call it

home

                     go ahead – call

                     an ache

                     into a name

           answer absent

           a body

           to hold

                                           take time

                                           between two fingers

this now will live

until someone destroys

the evidence

                     now

                     come

                     forge a world

                     that can never hold us

                     together

                                           the voice hums

                                           a wave warm

                                           and blood-close

a moment folds          

under fences

crowded

with loneliness

                   listen: miles

                   are just blankets

                   for wet skin

walking from tiny table to tiny table, asking who wants a Polaroid to commemorate the visit. I buy a photo ticket in the waiting room vending machine to get a picture by this bunkie or friend. We keep fucking it up – a blink at the flash; a strand of hair in the mouth; a last-minute glance away from the insta-camera’s snap and its uneditableproof of err. How to cheat; to stretch a ticket into time. Time into time. How to spend more time holding each other and posing. Posing, holding.

I will stop doing everything I don’t want to do

like sleeping in past eight or getting bored

in the drugstore self-checkout line.

Ants curling in synchronized task

don’t impress me anymore.

The full moon looks like a raspberry,

a five-year old declares, and this is my magic.

Nothing is not in conversation

with everything. Beneath the clouds

a mountain lion traces a body into a mind

afraid of dying. The pause between inhale

and exhale disintegrates in space, reassembles

as another gray hair. Get all the air out

to sing a little longer. An unwritten letter

teases an ache from the ether. The unopened

prison letter teases out letters for this poem.

Let me hold off transcendence

for another tomorrow. I don’t not want to die,

just not yet.