15-Minutes-of-Fame

the weight of loss breaks one's own sense of weight and measures as they'd thought that loss, in terms of weight, would lighten gravity's pull, but weight a minute, weight, a lifetime, and then the subject's vernacular alone, becomes a weight when a term like birth-weight breaks, in that weight given birth should be alive, not be the cold counter weight negating the very weight holding one to earth and only in this aching context, is weight lost this weight reminds me of drowning this weight reminds me of wings this weight remembers we owe something for the elusive weight death lost that day in the weight allowed to remain

Attic apartment, birds nesting between roof-tiles, I hear them scratch and I hear them cry. The rustle of their mother’s wings, the quiet sounds of sacrifice and hunger, these pink-fleshed chicks inherit their parent’s strength and swallow it down with clacking beaks, I hear the slow devour of motherhood, the gentle expansion of growing wings sprouting feathers. My bed-sheets awash with haze, outside the city shivers in the winter air and gathers itself into suits, newspapers, morning commutes, polite conversation and I watch the sun catch my ceiling with unblinking stares, prying its way across the room, frothing up tidal at the

Going off medication is like riding a bike. The doctor holds tight to my handlebars and lowers my dosage. The training wheels are off, and oh hey, look at me go! It's like flying but not, and I'm doing so well but then there's a horrible accident and I'm somehow upside down at the bottom of the sea with both wheels still spinning. "Help," I say, and my doctor pats my head, puts a band-aid on my knee, and writes a note on my chart. I've balanced by myself for months at a time, but I always end up hitting a fucking tree or falling off a cliff or something equally catastrophic because I am a catastrophic person. Except that is an exaggeration

my grandfather was a native; there’s no paperwork to prove it, but old pictures seem to say more than new words. Told me she lived on the same hillside as him when they were young, that once they were working around the same garden— said she never knew he was there, not until she backed into him while raking the land, looked up to see the sun cowering behind him like a shadow. He frightened her with his footsteps: my grandfather could walk across dry leaves without making any sound; a white man, she said, could not. I saw it in his face, the nativeness that she spoke of: the cut of his jaws, eyes which spoke bluntly withou

Everything you pack will be wrong. You will take too much - over the years your mind has adapted to an amazing list of non- essentials; bite the bullet: Unpack everything, leave it somewhere safe. No sundresses, wisps of cool for long hot days, no air conditioning; your body will adapt faster than your sensibilities. You will go rough & feral in the heat, feet callusing over shards of glass, freckles on top of freckles, body whipcord lean, with a cocky strut: a claim of dust & streets & secrets, leave your things behind,   there will be enough to tend, your husband, reputation, rolled cigarettes, cactus thorns in a dog paw, yo

i. in such a chasmic city who could suppress this poetic seizure?— interstate shadows amble away from their owners with every passing second eternal midnight’s a roadtrip away in regurgitated vehicles we scrabble for nine-month redemption and in the trunk we lock up turbulent tabloids and environmental brochures we pretended to read and we build our nests in the heartbeats between skyscrapers ii. valet parking intervenes with caution but is no less obscene for it and for all the concerned faces the ecosystem still falls prey to the hungry egosystem— a lattice of vanity scrawling its signature across Manhattan iii. i̵