There was a popular theory that they were gods, or angels delivered to watch over us in our final days.

Because of him

you love when five-o-clock shadow

makes your lips tingle.

See, quills can be softened on the tongue.

And so it was observed, Kircher writes, that the further one traveled from the capitol, the less trustworthy became the length of things…

Like being on a ship and seeing only ocean and sky, the Great Plains yawn out on all four sides, mustard yellow and mossy, the grass simply existing endlessly.

Its alabaster palm will lean to sow

what words will wind within their binding strictures

The endmost day was at last upon them all.

There's enough Summer here
for a boy to play until
he can no longer see his hands.

“She will play. She needs to play.”

What was that noise down in the kitchen?

The visitation of a memory?

Sometimes I thought I was rotting from the inside out.

little silhouettes
in Jesse’s ___________
small beings that are not
there 

Terrible things happen to good people

There are no answers beyond
what or why, nothing to ascertain.

We are familiar, these shadows of the past and I.

God rested on the seventh day,
yet I dread to rest

“Stay with us and bleed and live,” they tell me.

“Touch your hand. Describe how it feels.”

Out past the castaway skeletons

of train tracks and chicken farms,

my father and I cut through the drifts,

Dr. Giannini never says no to anyone, which is why his waiting room is always packed and noisy.