Moans of my neighbor come up through the wall as he gets a blowjob.

I remember I have a family across the country and shiver.

At the Y, an ecstatic man in jeans tells me he used to be 370 pounds, now everyone calls him skinny.

I use Siri Knowledge to look up a picture of tree leaves. Honey locust.

A woman on TikTok tells me to cherish the looks I have now. I am reminded of my mother, always pulling her neck skin back.

I weigh texting a man as sweet as crafting about Rilke’s Seven Phallic Poems.

I like the word throat, how saying throat makes you aware of your own.

In the park, four barn swallows, quick robins, encircle the low sky. In car terms, their color is probably something reductive and romantic like Midnight Blue.

Quick is a term for the flesh under fingernails and toenails, too.

I read Power Button: A History of Pleasure, Panic, and the Politics of Pushing and underline in black pen “a circuit which sends a knife through it on the instant.”

I know too much about the things that stole my mother’s life to consume True Crime, I want to text one friend.

The sweet man cleanses his eyelids with an allergy wipe, and I think childhood.

I spit in the barn sink, and the mercury-orange viscous thing takes too long to disappear. I spray it with faucet water off my hand.

If the present tense is a place that defers form, pain is its longest occupant.

If the present tense is a place you can’t stay, it’s a home.

If the present tense is a poem, it should culminate in a product, someone says to someone else.

A gun chamber opens into a gun chamber opens into a gun chamber is written in the present tense.

I experience one day without a sunset.