beat your momma Your momma so sad She cries at stand-up comedy and drinks until she can’t stand up Your momma so sick Her momma dragged her by her hair down the stairs out of where she had any hope of life without lithium Your momma so lonely She had…

one night in thailand we went to the river. we struck matches so many matches and lit the tiny wick-hearts of a legion of paper lanterns sending them skywards each one, a wish. the sky gamely gobbled them up. the sky claimed each one the sky never muttered a word…

for alex price i fill your cup, love; present it to you sloshing, and ache for more cup. you smile runes at me while reaching for a hosepipe. now we laugh, soaked through.

grief is the love that has no place to go. for several seasons, you received my river diving ever towards you from a height bringing you the trickle of my many mountaintops all gathered, thundering, in the valley between your arms and spread out, out, out over the delta between…

So I’m standing on a bridge, looking down at my feet over the benighted void, as is my occasional custom. But there’s nothing on my back — no reassuring hug on my shoulders; nothing to tighten just-one-more-time across my chest; no pilot chute to touch again for no easily explicable…

i wonder, love, if you remember me when you have washed me out of every sheet; when there is empty space where I should be. (your laughing face, suspended in the sky) (your mouth’s sharp corners slipping into sly) i wonder, love, if you remember me (the life restoked by every little death) (floodwater in my lungs but, somehow, breath) when there is empty space where I should be (your way of catching words like falling eggs) (the perfect knitwork of our tangled legs) i wonder, love, if you remember me

i loved you in the worst way . the way that wrote your elegy as i looked across a table and saw, at once, why everybody wanted you and the size of the space you'd leave. . because of course you'd leave. . your beautiful bodies so sanguine your belltower laughs, clanging, unignorable the din of your belief; the sometimes-slurring sermon of the fucking faithful. i bit my nails for you. . god, i wanted you to stay. .

I stood before the effigy As though I were the queen and the show was for me While my innermost wilderness tugged itself free Of the chains of the mind that bind it. He said I’d know you by your cloak - A bower sweet as a meadow oak. I…

For Alex “The ‘hammer’ is the first act, marked by aggressive social distancing measures across large geographies, leading up to a first peak of cases and fatalities. The ‘dance’ is the second act […]: a period marked by repeated loosening and tightening of mitigation measures. Time in the second act…