Fentanyl Fucks So Good

The Somalis brought it.
I don’t know where they got it.
They’re coming in from Edmonton,
driving slow at 3am.
They are coming though the Reservation,
they are stopping here and there.
They’ll sell me as much as I want to buy.
It’s more than enough to last me
—not quite long enough—
but I like the feeling,
the feeling of being dead,
even though I mostly don’t want to die.
I don’t want,
want no Naloxone, no,
I don’t want to wake up like that,
pulled from the womb
with forceps
and dropped on the pavement.
When I’m on I hear her voice,
my Spiritual Mother
speaking softly to me in the void
saying,
Give me more of those pills,
more of those pills,
more, more, more,
of those pills.

On the Cenotaph for Small Fates

There is always the anger of a woman overhead
flying around like a small, brown bird
looking for place to land,
and there are poets with their notebooks
and their screens open,
alone with their rejections,
their coffee,
their small fates.
There is Rimbaud,
je suis un bateau,
je suis un bateau
white hot,
but only for a while,
and again, all those poets with their small fates,
and there, some woman’s anger,
looking for any place to land.
That what we do is different
from what anyone else is doing,
and that it is necessary: This is the lie that sustains us.

Checking in on Tom Sawyer

At his sentencing
the public defender told the judge
that when her client was nine years old
his mother’s boyfriend had, in a drunken fury,
beaten the woman unconscious and then,
while the boy watched
(terrified)
the man pulled out nine of her teeth with pliers.
So here the boy stands today.
There is nowhere else for him to go,
and no place for him to stay.

The Last Prophecy of Nostradamus

I climbed up from the smoking crater,
thirty-three and-a-half deep at its center,
and at the rim of the crater
there was smoke and ashes
and limb after limb after limb
torn from the obliterated bodies
of innumerable boys.
I called out to the OLD MAN
and I asked him
what was to be done now?
The OLD MAN spoke
and he told me that I had done well
and that I was handsome, beautiful even,
perfectly made
and that I should keep on moving
and get out of the way
of the women,
and sure enough,
women had come,
quietly,
singly or in pairs,
and they walked the edge of the
vast and smoking crater,
halting and stooped over,
picking up the hands and feet
and solitary pieces
of all that remained of their boys.