Space may be the final frontier but it’s made in a Hollywood basement
— Red Hot Chili Peppers
Stranger’s House
The windows blink at us, light
warm like each apartment is filled with brandy.
In the corner, a cot, a trophy, and a funny painting of a lion
Passing the complex I held your hand like paper
traced nervous circles with my fingertips
plotted our dream house and where we’d curtain hide
when we want to watch people watching us
Lucid Dreamer
At 7 I learned to swim without sinking into the pitch-black prehistoric hell at the bottom of every sea in my dreams. At 9 I learned to exorcise my family members when the devil got them. At 10 I learned how to kick-fly, but always hit my head on the ceiling—every expanse of sky solidified into the roof of my house and kept me from flying. At least this momentarily diffused the dread of the nightmare like a YouTube ad would interrupt a viewing of The Exorcist.
At 12 I learned to fly in big skies, but I knew the dream was tricking me. I could see that the blue firmament and the fluffy white clouds were painted— it was all a set. At 14 I learned to turn invisible. At 16 I learned to turn other people invisible, mostly to protect them from demons. At 19 I learned to will vehicles into being, namely bicycles and tricycles with sidecars. At 20 I could turn anything into a tricycle sidecar—houses, ships, continents—and transport everything on them. Then my legs would hurt from cycling—the sidecars were so heavy. Soon I learned to fly with the sidecars, flying my siblings away from the devil.
At 21 I could distill the world into Lego dioramas and teleport across green oceans while skimming the surface of the water, resisting the whirlpool of the black hell. I learned to turn sidecars into cars and then RVs, but in one gory dream where cannibals were slaughtering everyone in some labyrinthine marketplace that was a cross between New Delhi and Mexico City, the roads rose and thinned into narrow wall plateaus, and my car regressed into a bicycle, and then into a unicycle that somehow doubled as a meat grinder that killed all the maya birds in its wake.
At 22 I had my first proper flight: it was up an infinite sequoia tree house in an infinite forest, because in that dream I was a nature god.
At 23 I discovered that I could pause my dream, swipe open its control panel, and select a mode: invisibility, flight, transportation, and, the newest addition—time. I selected the time option and concentrated very hard, straining to activate the function with raw sleep energy. Then the demon that was trying to kill me started rewinding.
Coffee Poem #1
The teeth in my brain grind
eyemetal flutters, chopping what I’m looking at
each slice of scene is prayerbeaded into a jawlock
in this heat, all sins are forgivable
the conscience scatters like a mound of found ants
panicking when you peel the wax paper off their doughnut
BLACK TEA
I title this poem Black Tea because I am drinking black tea from a cracked mug.
I set it down on the garage floor.
I want to title this poem Black Tea because I commit to writing about black tea
and using it as a metaphor for liquifying disquiet
but there is no startling image to confront here—
the poem is the titleing
A RESPONSE
If I poke holes into this setting maybe it will be easier to breathe
grandeur is not consoling
This sunset is a kilometer wide and tall as the worship
my pride withholds
After gold basilicas and having touched the petals of war
eating was useless
So we drank wine,
read Wild Geese aloud, swam far away, walked rounds on the band of Saturn
and found pawprints
sofia's journals 