During dinner, I sidle up to the car radio. The team I am a symbol of leaves raw meat all over the field. Night air dipped in ice takes piranha bites out of my bare feet. My sister’s house hits me like a blunt object unloading kids in the driveway. “I want a divorce,” the vacuum where I would be. If only to stop the assassination, I would frame my own murder in winter branches, the judges…

Glassworks of winter branches as if the trees might shatter, the way my elbow split at the touch of cement. Brittle season, depleted bone marrow bodes ill for the bone. A student harbors hurt feelings: The grudge ripens. Fragile winter flower. The flow of tractor trailers below my balcony window is impervious to viral infection. The voice inside you doesn’t know what to say this morning. The…

The full moon glares at me in my dark corner. For months, I ignore her. I pile the covers against my face and sleep. I would rather forget my dreams than try to remember. For months, I mouth the bullet hole. Snow falls in the window curtains, slowly burying the driveway. I keep waiting for an intermission. For a long time, I run on empty. Not really ready to believe the purr of my engine may hush…

How long does it take for the brush to be cleared, before one can utter a word, how much longer before the cut down can stand again on shaky legs? The conscience can only absorb so much, the child answer for only so many sins before the rain breaks its fist against the wall. How long before I realize there is no rush, I may meander through the smashed field of side effects, a meadow at sunset…

Fizzling out at night whatever climax was nigh slips away hidden in dark folds slippery eel             * Life insurance willing to pay out 75% for living people with GBM With the money they go to Disney Mecca for three fourths already dead             * Enter softly because I am soft In the morning Lili complains I got the seam wet the gap between sink and countertop washing strawberries for…

Guardrail folded around an invisible             body the case             of a missing person melancholia’s inability to mourn             * Lili returns to IKEA for the umpteenth time small imperfections in white paint             * Prozac proven to improve perfectionism How as a girl the promise of a new notebook dashed with the first slip always returned with another…

3:36 a.m. Lili shakes my leg             ice rain crinkles like cellophane             against the window             or the window could be the crinkling             of a sheet of cellophane Lying awake I re-bone high school chemistry on YouTube             rehash old debate cases             failed conquests             * It’s New Year’s I decide I’m too old for the dark French Roast make me…

I pull the hem of the sheet into alignment with the mattress, tidy to my son’s dismay the basement apartment. He wants whatever I’m putting away. Steps in pieces of green poop. I wipe his bottom, his heel. Unsure if some got on my shirt, I search the black-streaked silver polyester grain of my waistline.

At the butcher block he separates Swiss cheese from power greens, broccoli. I scarf equal…