Contents
I. No
Confession
The Fifth Vital Sign
Suicide Is a Mind Stripping Petals off Flowers
“Eating Is an Act of Optimism”
She Said: It’s Not That Things Bring Us to Tears,
but Rather, There Are Tears in Things
Memory Is a Kind of Broken Promise
Bronze
Poem for a Troubled Room
Fly Haiku
Virginia Farm Haunting
Metempsychosis
I Have Drinks with My Dead Friend’s Ex-Boyfriend
After Twelve Months, Someone Tells Me It’s Time
to Join the Living
II. Wolves in Shells
Into the Salvage Yard
Home Is a Four-Letter Word
Golden Ratio
Mausoleum of the Unfixable
Split Screen
Constant
Your Rose Bush
Last Call Sestina
Transemotional
Daylilies
III. Hidden Wings
Miniature
Chaos Theory
My Friend Asks What I’ve Been Doing Lately,
and by This She Means Men
Poem Ending with Six Words from a Women’s
Room Stall
Mechanical Reproduction
Online Dating
Earth, Hair, Fire, Water
New York City
The Heart Has the Capacity to Break
and Reset a Million Times
IV. Passenger
Elegy, Two Years Later
The Exactness of Birds
Ex as CSI Episode
Nine Man
And Then You
The Last Good Man
Hooke’s Law
Force
Love as the Circle-to-Land Approach
Horseshoe Crabs
Advice for a Dying Fern
Acknowledgments