Vessel [For John Coletti]

He makes the best of every situation
Even good ones       for the sake of
staking a position to feelings
In endless iterative linen closets
Where the fridge becomes the oven
And all flesh becomes patient
tentacles         Leads to a caper in the
flower mart     Leads to a film actively
watched in bar with the sound off
It’s a method in search of a
tool-making monkey       The proverbial
shit-faced wedding          The dawn
meeting in the heat of day       It’s trivia
night again in America             It’s the
kind of place where you install your
initials in the tile floor and gag
Like refs in motion       Where body
language meets fact     But we all need
to concentrate on tonight’s game
Not baby Jesus on the cross    Then
wake up, God in traction         A
nervous knack for lingers in twig light
Two days of push ups and mock
drafts In the vicinity of the vicinity
For which every use is an alternate
one    Every point of view subject
adjacent           A fault in which we
wade deeply    In effluvial flow

Vessel [Milwaukee Story, for Gabriela Salazar]

“Remember when we used to come here
& drink whisky & eat spinach pizza &
cry?” – Frankie Latina to Sean Williamson

To begrudgingly live by a code
means to suffer all loopholes Feral
potatoes between plots in debt
Fleet glacier of Northern Antipathy
Reading into reading into       Solid
light filtered through coffee grounds
A recent love stalks through the grass
of digital geography To stake no
claim To refrain from conversation
with elegant humans of recent regard
           The map narrates mood
lighting over seat 24A     A two-hour
flight spent looking out a window
Clouds in the dark Astounding
contagion       Using both hands to
keep from exploding You’re yours to
keep existence thin   Flying over
Lake Michigan           Not a sea
just an interruption in the screen
A world to edit            A shift in the
tenor of the engine     A closing
distance          A glimpse of the
ground in the shape of an aphorism
A poisonous retread   Another in a
line of charged particles         A fear
of the middle distance            A ping
pong ball falls into my liquid center
Where cohabitation becomes a kind
of exibihitionism        In denial bed
Wrath and hesitation It’s a brand of
light gossip    It’s placing second in a
race no one cares about       Handy
in the face of liability   I was almost
born during the quiet chuckles of cat
performance   I would not go
anywhere you can call home It’s a
technical term in an obsolete
technology      Like waking up every
morning married with nothing to give
but reasonableness    Like like like
garlic in my depths      A quiet
revolution shrugs        Cries into new
life       turns to damp dust      On a
hillock              Over the grange