January 2021

The lesbians that lived in the apartment to the left
of my grandmother’s were always described in whispers.

        Caught in her teeth, her jokes: a pile of serpents
        thrown at her neighbors for stealing her...

Gatsby is not drinking a gin rickey.
Dracula not puncturing a vein.
Jack the Ripper does not knife a teenage girl
deep into her abdomen and then snake her intestines
through the town square. The birds remain in the pines.
Hunter S. Thompson isn’t dropping...

Dog autumn attacks.
Syphilis autumn.
And death visits
one of twilight’s paralyzed legs.

Everything dries out
and all roads’ boundaries blur.
The old singer’s voice
droops on the recording.

“Hi Jugsun—no? This isn’t Jugsun? Jugsun.”
In midair, the telephone line
loses the receiver, and once-departed lovers
never return, not even in...