I invited the apostle to my stir-fry dinner by accident. I shook into my smoking wok a packet of dried
wood ear mushrooms—the ones I’d bought from a farmers’ market. I threw in a handful of broccoli, carrots, snap peas, halved Brussels. My husband
Name of the donation agency, which made me the goose: twenty-two and waiting
tables at Bacchus on Meadow in grad school. I had to inject myself with hormones each day
for a month to prod my ovaries. Three grand a batch, I’d told my boyfriend, dropping the egg
I, too, Hans Christian, once left a warning note. Your bedside
table’s scribble read, I only appear to be dead—an effort to ward off
the would-be pallbearers who’d drop you
Luke, I’ve been thinking of your green
burial lately, the taupe shapes your afterlife
must take as it grows in soft lobes
up sassafras, black walnut, and beech trees
in Vanleer, Tennessee. Your family
kept your gravesite’s location private,
so some punk won’t pilgrimage there, hoping
to pluck the clusters of shiitake or white button
I would’ve stabbed the man’s hand
had he not jerked it away—this is what I usually say
toward the end of the story. The man
had pried back the right vinyl side panel
That petal pink three-seater from the Baptist
thrift shop on Broad Street? Its ribbed texture
had the channeled dust, striped the upholstery’s
piping grey. You took eight months to tell me
your used couch came with a warning tag: that the sofa
had sat for decades in the waiting room of a Richmond
I had to quit waiting
tables at Bacchus, in Richmond, that summer
because of the hot-and-cold switch. Each time
I reached for a guest’s ice water to refill it,
the pint glass burned my fingertips as if
I traced the copper sides
The scent of the jasmine comes in heavy
as a past life. Like the one you left
after three and a half years in Houston. You’ve cracked
the window now so you can sleep
with a breeze . . .
Someone arrest me here in this city park where an ivory
heat combs itself in slow strokes from the swamp . . .
Clover and oats, a tangle of bile-
singed timothy hay—what Sonny
said we’d feel. Gloves
kissed to our elbows. Ferment of the winter
cow field . . .
We imagine Natalie held a gelatinous green
sliver on her tongue, that its watery
disk caught the lamplight before
she slipped from her yacht
to drown in the waves off this island . . .
A reaper and his phosphorescent lynx
hang from my coat hook. I’m already
this far from sleep. Whole species away . . .
you’ll have shaky hands all your life. I thought
caffeine, a strained tendon from typing
with my wrists
curved back. I thought bad
nerves . . .
That’s when I knew the mirror was all sex and hard
fact. Unlike knowing my grandfather
posthumously. Because a ghost can’t be
androgynous as a lamp is,
as peat moss is,
as the smell of cedar—
knife-feathery . . .
I told the serial killer he could feed his Venus flytrap Spam the summer I worked the outdoor lawn
and garden center. I’d known to say this since fifteen, with my mother telling me all men who ask young girls directions from their white vans are murderers . . .
You visit me with your pockets filled with swampwater, the sunflowers
husked and unshaved—an anniversary bouquet
of faces which rise, with you and the temperature,
to strangers . . .
Turns out my body’s a dollar sweet potato
her register’s screen said, as she lifted
her scanner, and I laughed.
My ex-lover received it at seventeen skiing the steep slope at Wintergreen called
Devil’s Elbow. The early snowmelt along the Blue Ridge had slipped the white limb of a birch
You moved clippings of your childhood spider plant
with us in a Ziploc half-filled with tap water
so we could grow something once rooted in the cool
valleys of Blacksburg in our new
Houston duplex . . .
The way the tits of lemon meringue whorled
in the window that day
looked at first like breasts, then more like paws of my grandfather’s
clubfoot Siamese.
I want to believe that, after he died, the cat didn’t
gnaw off his face . . .