Is it finally fair to say like gods / we make images to pour ourselves into?
If you’re not-Mormon, it’s impossible not to be aware of being not-Mormon. You learn about the Mormons, in order to be not-Mormon, and in order to not be tempted into being married to a Mormon.
My sister casts buttons through / her window—they shadow / / like pills into small ponds / of late winter ice.
like a book left open in the rain; pages wrinkle, / rip and fall before their ambiguities are read.
In the freezing season, the lacerated places breed / / bright ice in matrices and lattices, glittering, / highballing.
I see men as trees, walking. If men were trees, if our cities were forests, our towns dense groves, what kind of world would we then make?
You carry it in on your palm-stretcher, / a brittle-spit, a kicked-out life-in-a-stick, / / all stuttering beak and shattered spindle, / like a rickety dollhouse staircase.
“[The church] needs about 400 years of repentance to queer people,” the would-be priest laughs.
Remember how we used to love? / / The way our hearts were rough-hewn / and rabbeted together like the shiplap / on the barn out back
