When Nighthawks went on tour,

             I was left

with the logic of jazz, easy banter with the motorcycle racer

who remembered my red dress from a year back when I’d lurched into the bar

             with my best friend and a lover. Later I would fall

             asleep sunk into the sky of the blue couch. Their hands, upon touching

             the bar dog, swelled with hives.

The bar dog is dead now. At the warehouse party

there is no movement of abdomens. There are strobe lights,

and artists with work living beyond them, gallery-lit and alone

             in the city night. It is too dark to recognize

                                                               anyone’s shoulders.

Notes From the Drought

The survivors: pigweed and parsley, milkweed taller

than a child. The sky clenched its liquid

heart close while the dirt split like a map,

cut-knee dry, and the peas curled yellow in the fields.

I miss most the feeling that comes with downpour:

that I am but a feature of a landscape acted upon

by features of a landscape. By night-winging

condors, blue algae bloom, green gloves

of tomato sap, air spiked with allergens.

Give me your trailheads and bloated squirrel-sound

quivering in astringent air. Give me a hand

greased from the love of a county fair. I want to be filtered

through the membrane of a crowd. I want to see perfect

plums collapsed into the latticed window of a pie,

to see the line of geese a mile long swimming

in rigid form, summoned by something I cannot sense.

To feel the way I felt as a teenager with hay strung

through the laces of my All Stars on a wheel

that could be put up and torn down within hours,

watching July define the features of my crush

across from me as we sat suspended, untouching,

and below us our friends–loud with their hope for spectacle–

were only bugs, flocking to what was left open.