You found a chunk of my poetry manuscript. I hope you enjoy.

Zero Sum Awakening

There was a day when,
according to math,
nothing was left.

Before zero I was
closest to heaven, a
glass state I’d earned 
by spending those
most expensive days
moving beads through
my fingers, each pearl
a short foreign sound
intended to churn me
into some shape
more useful for
God’s grace.

I hit bottom on a
day I’d been sent on
a slippery mission
(the grocery store).

I’d fallen in love with
bok choy and peaches,
I filled my basket
with Whole Foods —
some ripe, some ribbed,
all imperfect as survival
deems living here to be. 
An automated voice
called me forward,
everything I loved
became a number.

I swiped cobalt blue —
my most adored ritual
object — thin and smooth,
a plastic slip to invoke
the fleeting spirit of
safety or satisfaction.
I prayed as I fed my card
to the silver grimace of
the counting machine,
awaiting the results
of a pass or fail test,
and read the only word 
that could awaken me:
DECLINED

Another thin block of plastic,
another offering to machine:
DECLINED

A peek inside the little room
I carry over my shoulder:
‍ ‍nothing 

I learned I was broke
on a day I thought I’d
neatly risen above the
need to be here, but
poverty resurrected me.

Born Again Winner

When I am born again 
I want to be the fish 
that doesn’t get caught 
in the net, Finally. 
I want to be eyes 
dilated wide and smoothed 
into pearls of blackness 
transformed by dying ribbons 
of incandescent light —
I want to be open and
impenetrable at once.
God-willing in the next life 
I am the bloodless trident
that rides a laughing wind
from deep sea to cloud,
piercing Cupid before
his feathered arrow can 
incapacitate 
little Me, again.
And if I must become
a timeless place I hope 
I am the bright, white, plush 
schema we call Heaven,
an order without 
competing sensations,
nothing left of hard 
where there is softness,
nor grief where is joy,
the void where earth’s hurt 
no longer robs the angels 
of their numinous pink
and heartbreak becomes the 
show I look down on.

Civil War

A burial, this culture.
Wills and relics drowned
by men of status; their weapons:
markets of waiting jars, airborne fears
of neighbors and nothing left for tomorrow.
Chaos leaves abundant residue, a simple grave,
honey-rich evidence of mass impression,  a warmer
lead of someone else to blame. Time makes us ancestors
of yesterday, so we build an armed body that lacks in wisdom
and scares all hope away. We preserve dignity like it’s an offering
to the God       of Losing.

Nightmare Nightmare Go Away

Tell me —  would you rather
drown face-up and grinning at
the sun, or lay on an unburdened
shore atrophied? Would you rather
learn enough to earn an alloy badge
in ‘ordinary’, or know so little that
you’ve got a black belt in bull
-shitting? Eventually everything
you tried to outgrow splits like frail
strands, embeds inside of parentheses,
ends up taking on your last name to
become an ending you learn to live
with. Eventually your bones and your
nightmares will dissolve, transforming 
in the heat of your unabated stirring. 
From this labor you will lose false hope 
but gain hunger, arrive in a subtle, 
chroma key process made of 
nothing but the next green step, 
nothing but raw material.

Untitled Entitlement

I am the shape of nothing inborn unique, 
no standout clovers but ordinary 
aged inside of file cabinets, 
Superficial yeses melted down
and reshaped into less forgiving plastic, 
timeless only in a nostalgic future 

This time around I didn’t arrive with
piano fingers that can race Debussy
neck-and-neck, No mission 
to save a country, but instead
copper inside of empty coffee tins and
not a lick of infallible boldness

I must be the pearls of blisters and not
of deep-sea beauty, I must be the sweat
of the working-class nape, I must be
pressed close to the spine of my
ultimate crisis — nest, beak, hollow belly
do not wait for the grace of entitlement 

Begrudgingly, I must ‘be here now’
and stand opposite of gold-plated destiny,
I must become the rusted antonym 
that clings earth onto metallic dreams, 
I must be mad, not like theater but like a fly
wishing to be dignified like a honeybee

May I plant a kiss 
on your lips, on your chin?
Will you call the pink love of this train
A kinship? A dragon? An ordinary day?
Touch my skull with your skull, 
find in short-sight a crisp harmony. 
Is this room loud for you too?

Hill Billies Don’t Believe in Accountability

A white mom
from private planes 
and gardens on timers
never touched by hands 
that also can’t cook 
that great
will tell her lost boy

“Son,
you don’t owe
those women
anything”

Anything
is respect
is the seed of like in love
is the supposed 
safety on the
receiving end of
chivalry

White mom
never needed anything —
no payday,
no apologies, 
no full sentences 
to expand the air 
behind a slammed door

White mom
has a roof
that leaks buckets
once a decade,
wears an 18-karat 
golden promise adorned in
blood diamonds

White mom
had her claws removed
before her wedding day, 
knows how to stay 
in an abandoned body, 
can always close 
her sky-blue eyes
and fly away

The End of the Rainbow

In the first hours of the newest best days, 
my solstice lover left me. I am only as surprised 
as my least twisted part. I am only twisted 
because eyes so in love with a torn map 
do not see straight. Where we arrive
there is no rest stop, only splitting concrete
and stop or go. Nothing here is rainbowed.
I know now that only straight men 
hate bouquets of roses, stomp on philia,
spit on the mossy roots of wonder, 
piss on the monuments for our primordial 
mother. They are drawing tallies on
their own reflection to count every earthly 
extraction. Happy with their forearms, they 
forget to smile at the falling sky. When you 
love like a woman, these men will hold a lit 
match up to a promise and become with their 
mouth the God of wind. If you want to 
survive, do not meddle with their metallic 
visions. They want war. I know now that
at the end of the rainbow there are men
with problems armed with weapons, eager
with the breath of pointless death to scorch  
the garden you worked so hard for. 

Hungry Ghost

I was squatting the way 
ancient mothers used to give birth 
on dirt when I did it  —
I ate the whole damn world, 
a cornucopia of rotting law 
and oozing accident, of 
earth-tones transformed by sight.
I was agape and stained permanently,
when it was over nothing remained 
but pitch and heirloom seed.

Before fullness there was
a hunger that echoed in my pits,
a premature spark somewhere
between Mars and Venus,
a new planet of longing orbiting
secondhand dreams, boasting 
forbidden fruit from evergreen trees,
a hollow whirlwind whose 
only inclination is to make
something that comes from nothing.