there are other things to be enjoyed. I DON’T WANT

TO BE PITIED said my neighbor, after explaining to me

she hated her children—not children in general,

but just her own. Her idea of a weekend

is not being pitied. Is someone else having about her

a neutral feeling. Our neighborhood is overrun

with garbage, and the summer makes it reek,

which ruins the otherwise neutral

feeling I have regarding the sun and the sense

of it on me. It’s not that I think of myself as my own

child—it’s more that I think of my body

as an animal that, having been bred with abandon,

requires a human steward, like those dogs unable

to birth without assistance, without someone

snapping on gloves and boiling the kettle

and cleaning the cotton sheets like I’m doing now,

clipping them up to dry in the sun. It feels so good.

Stoop

Stoop

All I can think, when I catch the dog out by the stoop

with a rat in her mouth, is I THOUGHT IT WOULD

NEVER HAPPEN TO ME—

that’s what the rat, I say

to myself, must be saying, having surely borne witness

to how many other rats gnawed on by how

many herders and hounds and yet fancying, all

that time, herself immune. And don’t get her started

on the thorniest part—how the fact that it happens

so frequently means her misery’s nothing

special, how the moment of her truest trauma is also

the pinnacle of her own commonness, and it’s juvenile

to cry for the everyday—so get over

yourself, I say

to the rat, who squeaks each time the dog

bites down, sounding just like those rubber chew

toys, which I suddenly understand are made to make

the noise of something getting killed—

Flowers Would Have Killed You

Flowers Would Have Killed You

The river is heavy with phosphorus and scum.

It causes liver damage if ingested.

I don’t know exactly whose runoff it is, but so long

as they’re taking press photos with prizewinning

children and donating sizable

sums to the ballet, I take no issue. River’s yours.

Once I saw a guy struggling to talk his way out

of some base thing he’d done, and his underwhelmed

companion said to him FLOWERS

WOULD HAVE KILLED YOU? Now I say it

all the time. The councilman announces he’s sorry

for taking advantage of the district’s trust,

or the paper issues the mother

of all retractions, and I’m right there at the window,

readying myself for the knock and the spray

of larkspur and tea rose. You shouldn’t have.

The Lone Acceptable Application of Daylight

The Lone Acceptable Application of Daylight

is in the expression PUT A LITTLE

DAYLIGHT between you and what’s

troubling, set out moving,

distance yourself from the pharaonic

shade of the household names and the power