I love the way Téa Leoni chugs

that martini—shaky, the news

she knows is bad and now believes.

Ryu, bro, what the hell happened

to the dragon punch tag team? My plane

pinballed the globe trailing you, I waltzed

in US airshows & seedy Barcelona nightclubs,

You guess and you guess wrong but Vanna White unzips her gown anyway and from the breach Annie Oakley steps out/she too slipping off her embroidered blouse and from inside her Maud…

Down in engineering you can’t even see

the stars.

Dad was so proud when I was reassigned—

the heart

of the ship, the heart

of the ship,

draw him up in fish netting,

bruise his bloated skin.

silence the green.

He made good on his promise to leave if there were rainbows. So she took off her pink stage wig and transformed to blonde. I cannot wash the Manic Panic out of my hair with even the cheapest shampoo.

I have over three thousand, you know—

brass and crystal, palm-sized, designed

to turn. You can always hear me coming.

The thunk and chime that sounds like

Why are the children in trouble? Darkness

demonstrated far better parenting

than who’s behind these baritone bleatings.

Whispering miserable things, such regress

with my unibrow

& elevated testosterone

& my strange obsession

My agent told me I would win a Grammy

if I wrote a spoken word poem, it would

be the easiest way to do it. You just write

Because I accept human fallibility

a man explains, voice like Telly Savalas

behind me. Voice of bald, of wide collar splayed, chain

With siren and flashes I was

trying to raise flames—

I couldn’t spread heat, flying isolated

and dead in this part of town.

Come on: I make more sense

than that bimbo with the part

down the middle. If the future

is run by machines, let them be

Post-doomsday & anti-

cowgirl, you are both raging

& repentant for the swollen levee

“If you win, you lose.

Add some butter.

I’ll either convince you

that you can be happy

I want to talk about the last time

crows talked to you from

the dying maple in the front yard.

Let's talk about new-old romance, the kind that only comes along

when your husband and your youngest son

are killed by sharks and you're just trying to get by as a widow,

a set of shoulderpads and a frothy perm,

You were the first

But you weren’t for real