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  be less happy. Then you thought for a while

  about how seasonal depression is a lot like

  biking in snow because everything is slow

  and flat and it’s so hard to move and you

  were thinking so hard that you ran into

  a parked car. You spent a while

  pretending to be a speed bump.

  Maybe hoping a little you would be

  a speed bump, outside forever,

  but you weren’t, so you weren’t, and now

  here you are again, drunk and biking home

  like it doesn’t matter if you die.

  Museii Vaticani, Vatican City, Summer

  I admit, I have read Angels

  and Demons. This museum is one

  hallway, miles of splendor passing

  or hidden as we shuffle to the Chapel,

  and I can think only of a box

  of stone penises. Some pope, terrified

  of indecency, castrated all the statues,

  and Dan Brown in his talent

  imagined somewhere in

  the Church a box of stone dicks.

  I am encircled in beauty; box

  of dicks. We get to the Chapel,

  I am peering up at both god and the god

  he created; box of dicks. Fuck you,

  Dan Brown, and also thank you.

  The Fence I Never Climbed, or, There Is a Parking Lot where Once I Broke My Arm

  I would like, if I may, to forget

  the dog shining in the road, the tire tracks

  over the body of the dog, the road

  on which the dog and the tire tracks are, the car

  that made the death and the tracks, the house

  whence the car, the family in the house, the trees

  outside the house, the child falling out

  of one of those trees, the hospital and

  the broken bone, the car emerging

  from behind the house with broken child

  inside, the dog emerging from its own

  house, the meal inside the dog, the grass

  on which the dog, the soil beneath the grass

  and the rock beneath that, the rocks I somehow

  always found in my hands and then no longer

  in my hands then swiftly into the face

  of some other boy, the other boys

  who threw back the rocks, the bloody

  noses of the other boys, the bloody nose

  of sunset as we all fought in the park,

  the park in which the dog always, the park

  always, my bicycle I rode through and broke

  in the park, the one backyard or the three

  blocks between me and the park, the football we

  played or tried to know how to play.

  Leaves Falling on Toilet Paper

  In Minnesota, autumn looks like winter

  on fire. All the leaves are colors

  like Cliche Red and Jaundice. Some kids,

  probably, have TP’d the houses on Summit

  because when you grow up with beauty

  I guess it starts to look like rotting

  leaves. Habituation occurs when you see

  something so much you no longer see the thing

  but rather the idea of the thing. You can’t

  roll around in an idea. An idea can’t kiss you

  goodnight or tell you peace will be here

  soon. We vandals love an idea.

  In Which the Author Uses Dance as an Allegory to Describe Healing

  She taught me to do the Jitterbug in her new

  apartment. The Jitterbug represents any relationship:

  you come apart and pull together, sure, but you’re always

  making eye contact. You’re always touching

  somehow. The new apartment represents, well,

  the new. Her apartment has a Murphy bed, the kind that folds

  into the wall behind a glass door. The bed

  represents sex, or rather, how we were dealing

  with sex: it’s there, but waiting, resting, ready

  to come when called. She was teaching me to swing

  with Elvis songs: Heartbreak Hotel, Teddy Bear,

  one and two, one and two: Elvis represents

  the past: Elvis represents our parents, who are

  dancing in the room with us. I can see them

  in the shadows, in the corners, they are with us

  always, but they are not us. There is a map

  of the world on the wall. The world map,

  in the cheesiest, most cliché way possible, represents

  what we want to give each other. I am not very good

  at dancing. This represents the fact that I am not

  very good at dancing. She tells me, “If we’re going to

  dance like this, we have to be close. No, closer. We have to

  be touching,” and this is the point in the poem

  when I have to tell you why this matters to you. I have to

  tell you what’s at stake here: when we were young,

  we were both in relationships that we thought

  would never end, not like I will love you

  even when it all goes dark, more like It’s so dark

  out there. How could you survive

  without me? People have taken so much

  from me that I don’t know how I’m not

  gone. Until now, just after the events of this poem,

  I have not been able to sleep with or next to someone

  without shaking like death grip electric, until

  this dance, which represents sex, which

  represents time, which represents

  a bed that now we’ve folded back down

  onto the floor: the bed: the eater of mornings,

  the altar on which we try to become

  each other, the last refuge of the last,

  but then, the bed was still waiting.

  There was a big, empty floor and she was teaching me

  how to swing. When I want her to spin, all I have to do

  is push and raise up my arm, but I am afraid

  that if I push too hard she will twirl into

  the night, the night of star- porch- and headlight,

  the night dark and full of terrors, the night that

  represents not death, but quiet in the way that silence

  is the only thing we have on earth that prepares us

  to die. I know I told you that this is all

  one big metaphor, but I am also trying to tell you

  that this was a moment in which I felt myself

  getting better. This is a poem about dancing

  and also a poem about how I see everything

  in metaphor and also a poem about how I spend

  so much time connecting the metaphors that I don’t

  just dance. I don’t just put my hand on her hip

  and swing. And the night is out there. It’s huge

  and it always will be, but right now, here we are

  in this new apartment with the world map and the bed

  folded into the wall, and we are just quiet,

  getting ready, just dancing.

  Popp Butterfly Conservatory, Oneonta, New York, Summer

  The sloth makes up a significant portion

  of the world’s biomass. They are

  “wildly successful” animals, and I

  hypothesize that they are simply too weird

  to eat. This sloth has a runny nose.

  This sloth is sleeping it off, it being the world.

  My hair is growing out again. I live

  my life so slow these days. I am going

  to ungrow two of my toes. I am going

  nowhere. I’m gonna be a sloth,

  mama. I’m gonna stay right here.

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