TIDEPOOLS ARE ISLANDS FOR FISHES

The tide lowers out of the San Joaquin: the gorges between the starfish arms of foothills, the scrub and brush of land urchins and field anemones. Pooling in its pits and creases, combine ruts, tractor furrows form dusty snow globes trapping beef cattle, crop fields, buildings kelped around fruit shacks, entire low lying developments.

The Blog

On your own, you don’t look at the porn blog I started where I repost pictures that turn me on and also ones that actually don’t but that I feel like are stylish. It isn’t like you are a prude and dislike it, but I think that you never think to look unless I say, “Hey do you want to look at my porn blog?” Then we’ll scroll through together, with my fingers on the up and down arrows. I’ve seen it all, but I still pretend I’m interested in what’s onscreen and not your reaction. I look for some minute change in you, a previously unknown or hidden kink that your viewing a reposted picture pins into your mind. Changing you forever, or at least until we had obsessed over it for a while.

This possibility seemed worth the trade off I made in showing it to you. Before I did that, I erased everything I thought might weird you out even if it turned me on a lot. I made sure there were more pictures with guys being dominant than submissive. I deleted pictures that depicted women interacting with dicks that were unreasonably big. I hadn’t noticed how many dicks in pictures are so big until I looked at my blog after knowing that I was going to show it to you. I thought about Adam and Eve and the Tree of Knowledge.

As pictures with twentysomething tits, patterned tights, peripheral cocks, and girls artfully being beaten scroll by, you always like it all so regularly, so easily. You like some picture of a woman’s nicely shaped ass, you might tell me. We fuck or we don’t. We don’t think about it when I close the page. It disappoints me so much, this acceptance.

Big Eraser

A car-sized nib
parts the
clouds sometimes,
pink and headed
downwards,
seeking terrain full
of sketching.
Nobody’s looking as
it brushes
out some details,
scrubs clean some
events.

You’ll only notice as
their gummy ashes
scatter or you
scramble over
indentations
in the paper—
troughs of you don’t
know what,
like new creases on
your forehead.

The other Creation of Adam
painted
only in the
Sistine Chapel’s cracks,
God’s pink fingertip as
the wrong
end of a pencil stick—
stopping reading
something then
soon forgetting
what it meant.

untitled

i think up
the best things
when I’m
driving

really, think up
isn’t right
i don’t think
anything

it’s just like…
bugs appear
on the blank blank
windshield
flattened like
they’re letterpressed,
stupid winged
little chapbooks

it’s only
without traffic
that they
won’t bounce
away
which is
the best time
for me
anyway
it’s fucked up
but I have
realized that
this is what
calms me
this gray
naugahyde yoga mat
these adjustable
vents deep breaths

in my mind
i am so elegantly
cross-legged
but my
right foot is
always pressing
down—

it is so
easy to crush
the throat of
every
living thing

i’m meditating
on dead dinosaurs at chevron
it’s the
best
i’ve felt