We come from the mountains, we have wolf / in our blood, we have pinebarb.

Make it out to my sense of melodrama or maybe just my consistent need for I think it’s called attention?

& so I hear / in the beginning I am not / 12 & I hear hips swinging a wide bridge / a chorus swelling in the bass / of my chest & I break

I fall into the mountain side; I burn in / to the twisting serpent of chambers / hidden there. I am wild for the underlength / of tunnels and beautiful men who run like blood.

Give me that handkerchief someone dropped on the corner next to the stand / where those suits are trying to swap sunlight for twenty buckets of swampland

Behind some airport some quiet organ -ization ignites a portable flare stack. Cindy, whose depression is tropical, is not yet a hurricane.

I should study knife skills / or fish deboning. Have you / ever held fresh, dead chicken?

Long after mother had said / “goodbye” to her piano, / Dad — dead drunk, / broke her mandolin.

So #MeToo cuts her ponytail off, walks into a bar and takes a seat next to #MeToo and the bartender serves #MeToo whiskey from an eyedropper

The river / splinters / its many / tributaries, / veins feeding / new shores / The cutting stone / juts

“How quickly this life does go by.” Tonight / I wrote the last letters / to my poetry students.

Trees living in their skin-smell, Appalachia has no need of my white poet / blouse and ripped jeans. The world as I knew it, gone, white as cotton balls

how is it / that you force-fuck / and call us whores / you tell us we only care / about your size, your wallet / when we’ve bought you flowers / yet there’s only dirt in your palms

I find the court bundles, / find the judge who / smeared my face with war paint, / fingered my veins for Pakistani valves like / my blood could be distributing homemade bombs.

a sophomore from art class. could he paint. i kept / his scraps of craft paper / and stray eyelashes in a jewelry box my grandma bought / in italy.