to my peeler and ladle and electric

oven where decades of hands

have worn the temperature marks

clean off the dial—it’s always a guess.

Cooking is important. It prepares us

for how to sustain each other

in the emptiness ahead. A bread

for sharing, braided with strips

of garbage. A novel kind of starchy pie

baked over one tea light. Children,

today was sent here by the future

to beg you to think of this place

like a body—it might be yours

for now, but it is only a matter of time

before it buckles and kicks and ousts

you and sinks, like the very

body it is, right back to the ground.

They Said It Couldn’t Be Done

They Said It Couldn’t Be Done

So sorry about the war—we just kind of

wanted to learn how to swear

in another language, and everyone knows

the top method is simply to open

fire and listen to what people yell.

And now here’s God again with His hand

crank, lowering the sky to make more room

for Himself. And now here’s the high-rise

we build to brace back, this series of holes

for bathing and mending and parboiling

roots and undecorated fucking in the style

of the times: one person half-braying,

the other admonishing KEEP IT

DOWN—I DON’T WANT THE WAR TO HEAR.

It for Me

It for Me

Don’t worry. Wars are like children—

you create one, offer scant

effort, then call it botched as the years

accrue, go off and make

a new one with somebody else.

A chance to finally get it right.

People love stories of tyrants

expiring in prison, as though an entire

reign of thrown roses and feasts

on command might be somehow erased

by the precast concrete, the drain

in the center of the floor.

But it’s not like anyone gets some ideal

death—handshakes all around

and then snuggling in velvet, saying

THAT’S IT FOR ME! What matters

is what you do with your best

years. No one can take that away.

Sunshower

Sunshower

Some people say the devil is beating

his wife. Some people say the devil

is pawing his wife. Some people say

the devil is doubling down on an overall

attitude of entitlement toward

the body of his wife. Some people

say the devil won’t need to be sorry,

as the devil believes that nothing

comes after this life. Some people say

that in spite of the devil’s public,

longstanding, and meticulously

logged disdain for the health

and wholeness of his wife, the devil

spends all day, every day, insisting

grandly and gleefully on his general

pro-woman ethos, that the devil truly

considers himself to be an unswayed

crusader: effortlessly magnetic,

scrupulous, gracious, and, in spite of

the devil’s several advanced degrees,

a luminous autodidact. Some people

say calm down; this is commonplace.

Some people say calm down;