THE UNITED STATES

Slowcore Pornography

He says I’ll find him where the oil refineries meet the sea,
where the black houses burn down to a pure black landscape
and a serious lack of courage. He says that verily my children will fill
the dollhouse, my muscles shall quake with their candlelight. I feel

the dead. I feel the girth
of the museum. I need
rare and exquisite. I need
stabbed through a red

curtain. I need where oil refineries meet the sea, frozen.
Burning through a black horse like a sheet of paper,
I need the sea. I need the dead. Detectives’ blood colors the field’s
mind. It worries. If it could think, it’d think behind the glass-framed

portraits of young men,
needing little. Marble
cattle fill the dollhouse
pastures. Their legs rot

right out of their skulls. That is their payment. We are expensive and vast
like empire, darling. We are quite gone. We assure you there is no such thing
as statues—only ghosts on the raw brown turf. So may this landmark
fill your body, my darling. May I take your glassy eyes in mine. May there be

shame upon it all.

Heather

Sarah is in her dressing gown and her
Autumn sweater. Rachel has pine cones

In her teeth. Even the dream itself has breasts
Like low-lying clouds in a fat man’s

Hands. The seasons, verily, will never end.
Get up and go out into the field, my boy,

Where the girls are standing
Among the artworks. Your heart

Shall never be golden.
Your blonde hair shall never rise up

From the sea. Hear me, my boy. The girl is rising
For the planes to blow right through her,

Autumn sweater
In her teeth. She is more scared of you

Than you are of yourself.

Poem

Cigarette Park smells like
The world was burnt before it was built.

Dogs with animal heads
Still feed on the fields. The beds

Are nailed to clouds.
Down the driveway, rain is falling

Like hair on the teenagers.
These are the last days.

Christmas lights
Show in the fields.

Where the horse has placed his penis,
Cattle roam.

The Casino

Maybe when the blue man walks out
of his blue house into blue light
and the glass woman’s glass eyes
are her mother’s eyes, and all
night long the little animals push their little
ambulances down the street,
maybe then I’ll drink my little glass
filled with ashes. When the deaf start speaking
and the deaf stop speaking and the deaf
can’t speak any more
is when the deaf start speaking and the deaf start
speaking and the deaf can’t sleep any more.
I guess that’s when you take up your icepick
and make all your icepick’s mistakes.
There’s a pocket knife somewhere on earth.
You use it. Then you go hunt in the river
so it moves as you move, speaks as you speak.
You can see your own chalk apparitions
in the water. Years later, you’re on
the Effects Channel and you look like a piece
of water. Something is causing me, you say.
Sometimes I think that there’s beauty
and sometimes I think that there’s beauty on drugs.
I think I feel my blood pushing on the pins
of the television. The casino drones on and on.
You say, the opposite of outside is more outside.
The opposite of inside is more outside.
I say in this moment absolutely everything
I ever wanted to say. There’s a fist outside
the size of a planet. I store my guts
in a trash bag and try to move on.
You’ve got your good things
and you’ve got mine. The TV is small.
I sleep with the brain of a cannibal but
I try not to move.

Slow Down

I 

The Redwood Forest leaves spark-burns on my fingers

wherever I touch you.

The world is kind.

Brilliant girl collides with

brilliant car. The offgreen earth

feels incorrect. This land is your

glasscrack, this land is my glasscrack.

I hate everything that has ever happened

before this. We listen to the slutty silence

of the electric fence.

II  

We go home

all night.

The leaves in my mouth are crooked but

in rows. I hate the sounds

of the prayer card I’m chewing.

There is so much good here in the dark

I cannot fathom the good that’s inside

of me. I walk into CVS

over and over.

I lose track of my items,

my friends. I do not think of you.

I run into my dad, and he soon becomes

every aisle, every light.

I take his hand.

He drives me into the Boston International

Museum of Fire, and my face—alive

—is finally everywhere.