We all knew about the sex offender registry before then, of course. Knew the ancient design of the website, were aware of the pictures of perverts and the bureaucratic sketches of their crimes. But we hadn’t thought to explore it; at least, not together. We typed the key words into a search engine and clicked the first .gov link we found.
…

we are the hyacinth girls / draped in wet / green tongues / green mouths / green stone / green drink / a rose repeating / a rose repeating / wet of the myth of absinthe / green mouths / green tongues of water / sugar cubes melting / a rose repeating / a rose repeating  /  the heart of light /  oh oh / the endless sign
…

my wifething he waits inside
just beyond our darkened foyer
holds a silk scarf to his lips
ashiver in a slant of moonlight
…

I was actually going to start at the opposite end of your book, and that beautiful first line: “My dead friends are back. I lie in bed at night and see them.” I honestly got shivers when I first read that – it was like this siren – it signalled perfectly some of the haunting and gorgeously sad moments in the book that were to come.
…

a bloody nail ripped in the accident of confession
a bloody groin hateful with wire
a bloody penis a dead white worm
a bloody toe between the teeth
of the poem
…

A woman weaves intricate baskets from discarded film strips. The sharp edges leave thicket-scratch cuts on her hands and wrists. I’m not a woman sourced to what’s my own. I’m not a woman eating her people’s dirt. I’m not healing.
…

I like dead ends. I like going where they lead.
…

I liken Time to an enormous millipede – anus and antennae tickling the distance of past and future. Every once in a while, a hooked leg nestles in my footprint. It’s in that intersection, smaller than a centimeter, where I exit such dreams.
…

I only know I have materialized and not entirely faded
from existence because my meat has not yet turned inside out.
…

I think that the cephalophore is a figure of unpredictable potential. Either coiling in on themselves, individuating their segments, attempting to reconnect, attempting to annihilate, orating, lamenting, etc. When the head is separated from the body, two new subjects are formed. I imagine another cut would further fractal. Decapitating each part of the body until there are infinite M’s.
…

TIGHTEN UP REALITY GANGSTER
THE HOLY TARGET IS
CELEBRITY HEAT DEATH
…

please think
about a murmuration of starlings

good and now
scan the symbols

perform the relevant computations
share the coordinates
…

A paracosm works only for the people involved in it—it produces nothing useful for anyone else, and the pleasure of being in it is so intense that I suppose it is has to be perverted, if you think of how “perverted” can mean “to divert from a natural course”—like we’re all supposed to be doing something else with our time, our lives, our minds
…

There is never a face. Never a word. There is the whisper of cattails.
A ritual has always just ended in humming shadow,
electric shadow, rainbow static cut by a grounded lightdoor.
Burnt and blackened scrolls. On the walls faded mandalas.
…

In the bible, we learned that Jacob had a dream in which he saw a ladder covered in angels. They came up from the dirt and from the sky swarming, darting. Earwigs sleuthed and fed inside my tonsils. A shape… bustling, buzzing, vibrating. I started to get goosebumps.
…

Sometimes as he choked me everything would go black but I could still feel and think and envy her, and that was enough to know I was alive and wish I wasn’t.
…

The page as a stage; the stage as a page. Can this ever be reconciled? Aren’t they both alive for the time being, albeit at different stages of decay?
…

THE HUMANOID PROVIDES US WITH A PRIMORDIAL EXAMPLE FROM WHICH TO SPECULATE//WHAT WILL MY BODY BECOME IF IT IS TO EXPAND INTO SOMETHING THAT YOU CAN STAND ON//CLIMB INSIDE OF//INHABIT
…

I taste like anesthesia. I want you.
…

Children will run and scream chasing one another over and around me. Shat seeds will lodge and take root in my exposed chest. Animals will frolic and rut before my silent witness. And the songbirds will join in chorus at my demise.
…

WHEN SHE SMILES HER TEETH HANG GLIMMERING IN DARKNESS
…

PHOTOSENSITIVITY WARNING: Content contains flashing lights.

For a long time the daydreams I had about my death took place in hotel rooms I’d been inside of that I fantasized about when I thought I was probably nearing the end of my time on earth, sometimes the room first, a vague sense of anxiety and wanting to escape it, sometimes the rope first, the bullet, the pills.
…

–this is like the moment in a movie about witchcraft when the witch stops time and walks around, picking things up and rearranging them in space through this glitch in time. So that’s how the shape of the poem appears to me: I make thought-space where I need or desire it.
…

Annihilation, Happy Enemies and Worm.
…

In Carrie Lorig’s ‘The Blood Barn’, a hidden thesis exists. It is not ourselves that tell stories to ourselves in order to live; it is stories that live in order to tell ourselves.
…

‘Body High’ is my new favorite LA novel. It’s a postcard view of the city, but a postcard that’s for sale at a sex shop and has been smeared with jizz from from a sleezy methhead leaving one of the backroom peepshows.
…

I am not transcribing the sunset because the colors do not replicate. With every pause I miss certain words. In my next dream, I will apologize to the landscape.
…

We pierce oblivion & in turn summon a violent blood from its breast. Siphoning as the lamprey, with rotund teeth & vampiric want.
…

I raise you from the bathtub
like a doula
crying and kissing
and wet
…

At last I am tired give me a kitsch knife and a foil star
a blue ribbon from the translation factory
in the theater where I faked a sleep
in the theater I mobilized my counterfeits
I was luxuriating in the loop
…

I am telling my babysitter dirty jokes.

I eagerly tell her. On a daily basis. On the edge of my seat. With the same stupid little grin on my face.
…

You arrive late and flummoxed, having just met the prepubescent reincarnation of your decade-dead husband. The camera fixes on your face for several minutes. How did you prepare for this? Did the close-up daunt you?
…

Alone, in the perpetual day of the cold blue sun that never moved—but why should it move? Why even think so? Lying on his back, Blenk blinked as he looked upward, studying the sun’s dim uniform disc. What was the sun?
…

Anyway, winter will soon cover
this dead leafy aroma

But will it be able to mask
the scent of blood?
…

We all cope with anxiety differently
She is talking to her brother to calm him down
I am waiting for Romeo, the tree, to climb through my window
To be my makeshift dress for tomorrow
…

You see it on the sidewalk. It’s a wad of fuzzy stuff and red stuff. It’s dry and flat and smashed into the concrete. Your brain registers it as an animal, but cannot figure out which one. You’re three years old.
…

i’m looking for Like-Minded Persons — to discuss all this — write in a Persona

bored with Porn, i went to the hairdresser and asked them if they could shape my hair in a way that would make my head look more like a Hamburger.
…

I don’t think anyone should be made to watch themselves have sex. To see yourself mid-orgasm is a horrifying thing.
…

I will remember the scene. I’ll know that the music falling silent was only the start of a process catching up with me. The speculative bubble eats its gains. I’ll wonder what the next phase is.
…

Does a tendency to deliberately stand in harm’s way make you courageous, careless, or curious?
…

It’s easy to know what is evil because people are evil. Just look at yourself. There. That’s it. There’s no philosophy behind it. Simple observation is enough.
…

it is difficult to distinguish their limbs
from the the filaments connecting them

their mouths are sore horror spaces
retching red phonemes
…

Some people get the glory. Some people get the glory hole.
…

Acceleration of the monomyth proceeded unnecessarily. There had already been sufficient data to confirm the full and unwavering installment of a publicly imprisoned proto-state wherein to breathe was to be taken
…

Dear Artaud,

The poets are restless in their coffins, for the Earth is preparing for a purge.
…

As in the way a form glides into graces, the seraphic order meted out languages, all experiential and orbital, grace upon graces
…

He was on an aeroplane trying to remember why he was on an aeroplane. It appeared to be a normal aeroplane minus about two thirds of the passengers. He rested the camera that he had been holding on the tray table in front of him.
…

I float above myself, watching myself do what I think I should do, and take these images home to process decades later. I brood over the acoustic quality/physiology of my thoughts. The atonal accumulation of blood.
…

For three minutes I was the last human being on Earth. I saw the second to last person get rooted in place mid-sprint. The momentum made his shins crack and poke through his skin and his socks. Then he folded like laundry.
…

for the with and hide the when, this is a floating point, a moving vision, a catastrophic reminiscence
…

Pale moth suspended in lucidity
The whole night exhales at me and I suck
At the part-dream, the part-cellular trace
The night flowers are murmuring, deep-voiced
A bulging throat in every stamen
…

It’s harder than it looks, especially the morning after, falling for the old dragon
playing russian roulette with those brown bedroom eyes. Teach me how to cry
like a woman cause I’ve only ever been such a good boy
…

The sun burns callous behind these eyes. Eyes of lithium saltwater & blue perfumes. Eyes of mylar flux revolving planetary. Dark cybernetic ritual of mind’s eye drowning in soylent dreams of Alhambra, Alcatraz, Alameda. Heraldic eyes draped in dead hair. Eyes grey as overboiled eggs.
…

I am still young enough, unformed enough, to be mistaken for a girl. Underneath my clothing there is nothing to betray otherwise, a sun-carameled body best left on the sand at the mouth of the ocean.
…

Don’t worry about me / down here / I am milking maggots / for fly wine with my feet / I am laughing wildly and lacquered in gold leaf / or piss streams, hissing tributaries / When hell strikes high noon
…

I’m so imperious I could be the sun, but
I’m only the son of a smuggled sunflower, and my
fear of loss. Paralysis dominates and I think I am done
palpitating. The despondent prince of the furious valley
of sex. But today is heaven I’m Daddy’s perfect girl
…

Utopia literally means ‘no place’. That’s its etymology and it makes sense to me: utopia for me names not a place like heaven or paradise or whatever but an orientation, a commitment.
…

Christina, the brat, could never understand what Metropolis meant to us at the time—seeing the titanium doll flicker into life, the human head as nothing but an extension of the lightbulb, a Bauhaus plug socket.
…

They gave the name of the deities or celebrants. I am twelve years old and my voice is hoarse. But I have had no reason for thinking that it is the other sows who used to sing an old spelling book which had belonged to Mr. Jones’s trap.
…

Gamergate, which I’m to believe is the societal realization that gamers are all Nazis because they tend to swear, soiled itself with a corporate man-bunned try for more diverse pixelizations.
…

I am selling myself to you. What’s my price? (Everyone wants to think they have one.) This. You. I pay myself with you, I am the one swindling myself.
…

If I have a religion, my religion is Wildfires. Whatever humbles Man is divine, whatever exalts him is evil. The angry gods have not been appeased and now they are wreaking their vengeance. I suffer when anything suffers, including human beings. Yet I know that the world is large, and dark, and human beings walk in ultimate blindness.
…

The cephalophore bears their head. Held by the hair like a lantern. Wired from scalp to forearm. Where fibres puncture the bulbous meat.

Some kind of neural information is transferred from the optical plate to the vesseled body. It is difficult to say if the mind is conscious in the brain or the body.
…

The radio signal from Beings passed us just over one light year from ‘arth, fifteen years into our voyage, several generations from _______.

The ones that arrived would name it.

We were elated at first, as we were taught to feel, that finally our species was not alone in the universe.
…

If it’s true we needn’t doubt this day extends itself in infinite embrasure, our ruins mutual and proving so very wallowable, I’ll – what I will – give myself to that acropolyptic merriment, open wastes condensed to diamond bottom-ocean scoured
…

I drank to comatose my flesh and keep the knives possumed inside me –

(From high school through my twenties, I worked in mold-thrushed houses where a tenant’s coffin bloomed.
…

quick touch me the way I’ve seen Ohio & West Virginia touching
secretive & unexpected & impossibly soft
where I once spent $180 on fireworks in the name of love
that fell straight down from the sky like the rain
…

Eating bees. Eating bees. As the bees sting your esophagus you silently and patiently name them. Seppo, Dave, Wallace, Richard, Cameron, Paul, Judas—names like that.
…

The world of childhood
Was like a drunken dream,
A world without money or friends
That’s when coldblooded dreams of
my own death
Came in the night,
With heartless regularity
…

Human desire is a micro-organismal haunt loaded into the skin by viruses and bugs that outnumber us ten to one. The family in Ari Aster’s Hereditary stays infested this way, stranded, yet unabsolved, scurrying around its auto-decapitating praying mantis matriarch, who spoons them the wound
…

Three
Days
I thought
Of you
While
Staring at
A field
…

I miss my daddy. David Berkowitz said that. I was living in London and mostly unhappy. I had come to expect exactly nothing of interest. Almost no one had ever heard of me. I had money but you couldn’t sell me the want.
…

come morning
he cleanses his hands
before praying
goat skull stringed to his forehead
hamsa amulet hanging down his chest
…

… in asphyxiate of terminal edge cold dredge from it commence taste of bitter ashen of broken lights collapse into given tremor forgotten bled from once sensed till foreign trace of shit upon meat no longer forage for in or of inactivity silence as ever
…

it is a crime, she said, to invite another person to live a life that is not theirs, but at some point in our lives almost all of us commit that crime of the imagination for which there is no pain, no cure or repentance;
…

Panting … I fumble for the telephone. My lower back aches. The clothes VV wears are mismatched. Sweat over his dried body. He opens the bathroom door. He paces. Other people are sleeping. He inhales. He showers in total darkness. These unstructured scenes.
…

although This Supposes the Title is Therefore Excluded from the Text, or stands as sovereign; as the crown lording over the lesser body; or Prose & Poem or perhaps: the Non-Distinction of So-Called Differential Literary Forms and Methods, and the Non-Relation of the Title to the Contents
…

i want to cut open my face and dig for diamonds.
…

Dream // scorpion crawling // father swaddled in white towel // blue sky clear // terror of dirt // the white of eye // the dirt is black // the black of sun // filling vision
…

I am truly blessed. I have fingers.

I have blessed TV dinner fingers that perform the prerecorded act of a cultural vivisection upon a deformed network television hospital drama
…

The economy of your desire
Has entered the ice age overnight
Frozen lakes of despair
How long will it take to thaw out
…

Somewhere in the world death is wrapped in permafrost, unable to force decay—a place much farther south from here that exists in light, or darkness, in perpetuity.
…

The sky vibrates honey and pollen. A series of hexagonal alcoves form across the landscape. The surface of the planet is becoming unrecognizable. Recent swarm murmurations have begun to take on mutative qualities—not in the rapid transformation of their shape but of their composition.
…

i’m on my fake account

@gmail.con

i can’t spell for shit i’m so soft

i sign my real name
…

happy snapping, postman
in and out of love with dust

queer apparition, distant clinking
scraping the bottom of the feel-good bottle
…

everyone a Christ
I’m a Christ apart
stroking my tree
through the copyright
that established me
…

They’ve managed to gentrify my rash!
Gastronomic pleasures and their rival,
I say,
“my tiny deaths salt these plates and you dare as for seconds?!”
…