Colleen Lopez Battery Fiasco

moonlight dogs the invalid like a signature

Ode to Lois

I never say this, but, it wasn’t perfect before you either.

Ode to Shea Butter

little greasy continents of you

Peach Silk Full Skirt, Pleated

Grecian dress, high resolution, every translucent transparent.

What Was It For

The only thing I could see was bats,

The Stones

The pumice was too light.

Handle With Care

do not forget
to set fire to
my hair;

Sea Chanty

it depends on what continent you mean

Ditty

he’ll be here when you leave 

Capital Song

But still there are things that no one should pay for

Autumn Collapse

Be happy
Like rock fans in the summer 

Rich Kids of Abstraction

Herman Munster moves in the shadows

Sylvia (2)

Skulls laugh and smoke cigarettes  

Watching World War Z

Incredible, the shapes a crowd can take:

pyramid, tentacle, and wave.

Postmodern Unicorns

and crucify your darlings,

Bits of Sky Construction. White Begs to Be

             Involuntary brightness 
goes to the tramp parked in the field I want 
to know.

The Honey Lump Watched From Here Goes On

No, Shadow, I don’t need you. 

Had Everything Without Shadow Unset

A branch in my way joy.

A Clara in my Throat Smash Wholes Us Lovely

                                         O come again, 
the porch is getting night.

In a Monstrance of Glass and Topaz

                              Kelp 
Trails gulls through a dead

Whale’s ribs.

Fragility Mortality

No but the word used its singular delay

Saga

We sucked antler's marrow
and poured a bronze cast.

On the Town (1949)

We ran out
and afterward that night wasn’t running out.

Double Indemnity (1944)

A flame in soft focus.

Rose 1

            that
            taste
            of
            the
            source

Rose 54

            this
            time
the
flower
is
strange

Bela Lugosi's Dead

Now it will be for the sour grit
of pill against wet throat.

Of War Horses

terrible myth—

Corpse Pose

The flies I can’t get rid of

I Love You

to lose myself in decades unnoticed
under long thin blue bulbs in hallways

Real Raspberries

old salt never hard your friends said

The Final Countdown

buying up misunderstood spaces
of cleverness and love

History Lesson

Another satellite image but still no plane

We'll make a fire tomorrow

Grendel's Mother

She looks to her man, then Grendel,
deceitful as a wish, a wish caustic enough
to make a genie sulk back to his bottle.

Six Poems

Living in the sawdust was looked back on as
“ill-advised,” like George Washington said a lot.

State of Nature

Guilty of faith, our pillars our pets, you 

Private Beaches in Malibu

documentary 
edging)

Actaeon

He’s glimpsed too

Much of heaven

Pentheus

punish those desiring punishment.

Self Portrait as Maenad

afraid of capture

Insomnia

you can listen to the shifts
 

My Life Had Stood

You loathe good poems in pain

Cobs

to an airbus than to swans in flight

The Consolidated Monster of Past Lovers

God knows how you can get a date with all those arms.

Sangfroid

A woman goes forth with what she is given.

Five Poems

 the world   in a laptop   glow

Say that nature has no opinion

I will no longer hurl adjectives at a tree
 

Infynyti

Advertising herself with gunshot blinks
 

Throned Sequel

The boy screaming bridge episodes under winter
 

Disappearance

He became a dictator
when I forgot god in that
dark turn (of events)

from Pushkin: A Play

As if we've had not enough crosses
 

Reclamation

It is a needle through the land
Through her stomach

Modern Funeral

This was a formal, clinical ceremony

The Fingernails

Confession of his grief to a friend, a principal cure of melancholy.

Ryan

Trill through heart encrusted mournful belting

There Is a Whip on My Eyes (An Instance of Sound in the World)

St. Elmo’s fire at the cattle’s horn tips
makes blue-white reflect on the dam,
seen early—only—by them.

End of the Chapter at Night

The sauna boulders steam
like a wide open mouth in winter.

An Arrangement of the Beginning

Startling at each other’s touch.
Such pent-up electric joy
of my younger self.

Memoir

I was the hybrid. I sewed my brutal double-helix into a child

The Hitch

to pity the need you must
punish the stone

Rigor Mortis

and you will climb out of your
            window.

Vague Bonds

glass has a greenness

Scenes Deleted Before the Release

Like parts of some distant being
That remain disparate
Long enough for each look
Of desperation

Parting Shots

I’d rather try to hold
It in my hands after
The fact;

The Seer Dreams Antigone

If you do not speak up for the body,
            the wrong person will speak for it.

Two Poems from Want

denied you can’t hear zero

Milt,

If an entire
family is overweight, chances
are the dog is too.

Resistance Training

welded to the lever-ends, an arm
lifts twenty whispered seconds
down again.

Responder

your voice returned to me, a living
 

Poison Oak Candle for Southern Agrarians

The ransom’s house
Spins spider holes, races air
In a gossamer globe.

Agent

thrust yet shim a donut, nothing
touched, I’ve read of halos

Chicken Grease

Most mornings, despite the argument the pome

Calmly orates, which propagates complaint for

Which one would rise against,

Sun Bath

I quit writing poems
and joined the social media class

Conversion

a kind of prayer

The Function of Fantasy in the Lacanian Real

my answers fall flat.

Work of Art

​love forever changes

Is Your Name Miriam?

Both moon and ocean, solo and whole.

If I Get Taken Away or Like Snatched

I don’t answer, so no one does.

The Tower

You were prayed over
so very many times

Charitable Trust

Hunters are quick to say
Their relationship with their dogs
Is never mere ownership

Swimwear

The dissolving surf and sand are shadow
of a boat

Pacing, Leashing

Odd glamors. 

The Expat

the cigarette-dazed clatter
of dishes & post-hipster waiters

The Woodsman's Ring

Death, she favors the wounds of her child
and so no longer strikes him.

Workhorse

Surely this could not be the present
from which I would flee,

Awash in the Green Beheading

                                            The head

cradled in wild green arms

stewing in its own juices.

O Coloritmo

from the miner’s hand
                                  

No One Came

Either all or no angels arrive in the mind where the plant is.

Three Los Angeles Poems

He owns a good number of cars
and a small Coke factory.

In Her Uniform

what $8.25 an hour
gets you

a nap
in a Kia
the can of gas

Hard Ripples

No longer a cause of caustic complaint
I paint you here in the infamous locker

The Enlightenment

We will be ruled by small machines no doubt of wonder and science
 

Not Really a Dream

He is being carried by a handful of sparrows
As if he were a tangle of twigs

Axiom of Government

bullhead wedged in a tree.

Baudrillard's Fever Dream

He’s an old man
sleeps with water
sitting on the nightstand.

Love Song to a Moth

If you’ve ever wanted to swim
in aspic this is your chance.

Back to the Future 4

thus the curse
of the poet

Why Don’t You Make Like a Tree... And Get Outta Here

life’s a bro

and then you die

Letter from the Church of the Broken Body

someone said our village will never
be loved again

from In the Gun Cabinet

               the person you’d become, in relief against a shadow

Pliant Intake

I future our grain
follow its lines to fruit 

Your Long Hands I’m Sure Are In Your Coat

when I’m just me and meet sleep
 

Ode to Lithium #59: Beatrice

My grandmother
is buried
in Jerusalem under
pink earth.

Poem

Everything is real if you believe the sun is large.

Stratosphere

Can I answer you in Italian?

Pixels

Home is a lampshade, and it's everywhere I'm not.

Home is for radios and dolphins.

Another Quartet

How do you feel when the world exists too rapidly?

Do you run laps around museums?

Being Sometimes

Like analogies without bears.

Like going home for the first time. 

Zack Morris Cell Phone

I had the Saved by
the Bell soundtrack on CD.
Used to listen to “Friends Forever”
driving to take the train to the city.

Cruelest Month.

How he threw all the things you loved down the incinerator. 

We Wore So Much Skin We Had to Call It Leather

Indulgents and Ignorants

Climb Smiling Cars

In some states depending on the laws
you’re an accessory by being
there 

In the Eight

desert of fishbones and formations

so primal only a pastry chef in a time

of ascendant decadence could mimic

them unconsciously

A Failed Poem

I wrote in my notebook
oceanographers drinking water—irony? 

Save the Mare

I haven't saved a single survivor, nor been motivated to extend my spleen for rescue's purposes.

Pavilion of Hefts

The fact of the body
                                somehow not only your stomach

Eugénie

mirth of spheres music
 

Insect Plague Halts Cars

Cast of Loo Cheese

When in Paris she had taken regular internet lessons
at the Crèmerie.

Latex Angel

the coffee shop white men leer 
latitudinally for verily unto thee 
​they are made of coffee, plaid shirts.

from Polar Bodies

we had to ask

which forms?

Dorothy’s Little Bed

No more insects while walking in the opposite direction.

What kind of insects, very large ones that talk.

The Noble Lie

In frustration of this natural authority, outright contempt, they chose to speak on behalf of the ill mannered.

Mania Assumes Shapes

Sleep darkness silence, a little truce like a goat’s beard, fascinating device.

Listening Is Truth

Pico de la Mirandola and the dignity of humans.

The Water’s Lovely

Jenny, Benny, and their money encounter a passing breeze.

Longing and Uncertainty

The thread weaving me from experience to experience is invisible to me.