You would have been / my first kiss if you hadn’t always / beat me in Street Fighter.

The fence was wooden and went like this: slat, picket, picket, slat, post. Slat, picket, picket, slat, post. The girl’s name was Mary. The fence’s name was Paul.

In 2015, we wake up lonelier than we’ve ever been. I can’t stand, we say, as though our muscles have been scraped away, misplaced somewhere else.

I was a bad dancer and Dariusz was a weird one, and on Fridays we’d run into each other and have conniptions together to whatever was playing live.

He wears the hell out of his gas station jacket, khaki and covered in

patches.

As a kid—soon after moving to a new house, in a new town—I became obsessed with Fuzzy, the dog next door.

you put the penny next to the periscope

and made them kiss

like it was their birthday in the year

you forgot to get the kitchen reupholstered

It was my twentieth birthday, and my boyfriend asked me to close my eyes and hold out my hand.

The tower is not a phallus, it’s the iron tongue

of the Earth which tastes the void in the skies.

She had never been this close to a boy, close enough to feel the scratch of chest hairs on her back, the rough, warm pressure of fingers cinching her waist.

In 2010, I unexpectedly secured a media badge via my university’s magazine to see a space shuttle launch at Kennedy Space Center.

SLUG POEM

(after Elizabeth Spires)

I want to say how I feel about you

animated booger, kin of phlegm ingesting your

I take things

Things that aren’t mine

Why would I take my own things?

Grey squirrels live in my soffits. Not the albino squirrels I see running around my neighborhood, though they are grey squirrels, too?

[JENNIFER GETS OVER HER EX]

She realizes it’s been months

since she logged into his email

or checked his browsing history

Uncle Royce runs out of flophouses to nest up in—halfway joints managed by chain-smoking program pukes with carry permits and ten-year chips in their khaki shorts.

THE SUMMER I HALF DATED A ROCK STAR

How much longer are we going to look

for Arby’s?

Believe me, I know from hands. I think I could recognize us just that way: ArtiezToyz has clean, broad fingernails and almost hairless knuckles. MPHotWheels wears a gold watch on his left hand.

THE IMAGINARY LOVER TOXICITY SCALE

1. Lover is harmless. Nameless and faceless, a composite rockstar with Adam Levine’s forearms and young Bono’s dark hair.