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You are the quirky little sister of Las Vegas that never finished high school, with your Kurt Cobain slot machine, where instead of apples and oranges, different brands of pharmaceuticals revolve in Kurt’s head. A pair of valiums doubles your bet, but three shotgun shells is the big pay-off. Reno, your pawn shops are loaded with prosthetic limbs and wedding rings. One night a lucky bastard cackled down your strip, chucking twenty-five dollar chips over his collar, then dumped the whole six thousand in the river just to watch the panhandlers plunge. When the moon’s right, their femurs still glitter like rods of gold. I could stay here forever, whispering the details of the life I left behind to the blackjack dealer who flicks me my future one card at a time. The Jack & Gingers stack up like a glass chimney, as the losers are hauled out on gurneys, howling for one last chance. Lady Luck whips out a hag wrench, prying my smile off one nerve ending at a time, and I wander the desert at dawn, like a general returning to his senses after bombing his own people, muttering My God, what have I done?

Jeffrey McDaniel, Reno

Hey you, dragging the halo- how about a holiday in the islands of grief? Tongue is the word I wish to have with you. Your eyes are so blue they leak. Your legs are longer than a prisoner’s last night on death row. I’m filthier than the coal miner’s bathtub and nastier than the breath of Charles Bukowski. You’re a dirty little windshield. I’m standing behind you on the subway, hard as calculus. My breath be sticking to your neck like graffiti. I’m sitting opposite you in the bar, waiting for you to uncross your boundaries. I want to rip off your logic and make passionate sense to you. I want to ride in the swing of your hips. My fingers will dig in you like quotation marks, blazing your limbs into parts of speech. But with me for a lover, you won’t need catastrophes. What attracted me in the first place will ultimately make me resent you. I’ll start telling you lies, and my lies will sparkle, become the bad stars you chart your life by. I’ll stare at other women so blatantly you’ll hear my eyes peeling, because sex with you is like Great Britain: cold, groggy, and a little uptight. Your bed is a big, soft calculator where my problems multiply. Your brain is a garage I park my bullshit in, for free. You’re not really my new girlfriend, just another flop sequel of the first one, who was based on the true story of my mother. You’re so ugly I forgot how to spell. I’ll cheat on you like a ninth grade math test, break your heart just for the sound it makes. You’re the ‘this’ we need to put an end to. The more you apologize, the less I forgive you. So how about it?

Jeffrey McDaniel, The Jerk

How strange, the miracle slant rhyme of your name, a three syllable oasis, here in the White Pages next to information I once knew by heart: the nape’s bouquet, the hip’s cliff, the ear’s hiding spot. How simple it seemed that spring, with a quart of green cactus milk between us, on the ferry from Naxos to Crete, when the moon was the one clock, and stars only had gums. And the summer in Barcelona when the French children actually cried at the sight of my dreadlocks. I used to think, if we kissed in every time zone, it would always be the blue hour in which I loved you. It still is. The literal lightning bolt lodged in your family tree. The erased surname. The alibi bone placed inside you. A secret takes on a shape beyond language, becomes tangible, something potentially broken in half, for the world to see and give words to.

Jeffrey McDaniel, Meeropol

There is a mob in the backyard, protesting my nightmare. They wear t-shirts bearing the image, of the man who wants me dead. They chant the same 'Down With Jeff! ' slogan so forcefully I swear it has a shadow. What have I done to deserve this? I pick up a sign and move among them, like a kind of silence murderers return to. I join the chant against me, and for the first time I feel a sense of belonging.

Jeffrey McDaniel, Objectivity

During my formative years, my mother had this annoying habit of taking me into shoe stores and forgetting all about me. She'd try on heels and pumps, sandals and beige leather boots, winking at herself in the mirror, like she was Cinderella. I'd crawl into the stockroom behind the stacks of boxes, until the last employee clicked off the lights and headed home. Then I'd emerge, place a shoe horn in the palm of my favorite mannequin, and sleep at her feet gleefully because she was my flesh and blood.

Jeffrey McDaniel, Mannequin Complex

If you heard your lover scream in the next room and you ran in and saw his pinkie on the floor, in a small puddle of blood. You wouldn’t rush to the pinkie and say, ‘Darling, are you OK? ‘ No, you’d wrap your arms around his shoulders and worry about the pinkie later. The same holds true if you heard the scream, ran in and saw his hand or -god forbid- his whole arm. But suppose you hear your lover scream in the next room, and you run in and his head is on the floor next to his body. Which do you rush to and comfort first?

Jeffrey McDaniel, Hunting for Cherabs

I wanted you to be the first to know - Harper & Row has agreed to publish my collected letters to you. The tentative title is Exorcist in the Gym of Futility. Unfortunately I never mailed the best one, which certainly was one of a kind. A mutual friend told me that when I quit drinking, I surrendered my identity in your eyes. Now I’m just like everybody else, and it’s so funny, the way monogamy is funny, the way someone falling down in the street is funny. I entered a revolving door and emerged as a human being. When you think of me is my face electronically blurred? I remember your collarbone, forming the tiniest satellite dish in the universe, your smile as the place where parallel lines inevitably crossed. Now dinosaurs freeze to death on your shoulder. I remember your eyes: fifty attack dogs on a single leash, how I once held the soft audience of your hand. I’ve been ignored by prettier women than you, but none who carried the heavy pitchers of silence so far, without spilling a drop.

Jeffrey McDaniel, Letter to the Woman Who Stopped Writing Me Back

There’s a woman I’m in love with, but I forget what she looks like, so I take out my paintbrushes and create my image of her. Your eyes are blue like the morning of going. Your ears are tender twists of logic, Your thighs are impossible avenues my car swerves out of control on. I want to cut the silence with one of your shoulderblades, blow moon-shaped kisses to orbit your skull as you sleep on the highest ledge of my insomnia, but I’m a broken promise in a pawn shop, and this is just a secret that happens to involve you.

Jeffrey McDaniel, Another Long Night in the Office of Dreams

I’m sorry I was late. I was pulled over by a cop for driving blindfolded with a raspberry-scented candle flickering in my mouth. I’m sorry I was late. I was on my way when I felt a plot thickening in my arm. I have a fear of heights. Luckily the Earth is on the second floor of the universe. I am not the egg man. I am the owl who just witnessed another tree fall over in the forest of your life. I am your father shaking his head at the thought of you. I am his words dissolving in your mind like footprints in a rainstorm. I am a long-legged martini. I am feeding olives to the bull inside you. I am decorating your labyrinth, tacking up snapshots of all the people who’ve gotten lost in your corridors.

Jeffrey McDaniel, Compulsively Allergic to the Truth

The Badger is the thirteenth astrological sign. My sign. The one the other signs evicted: unanimously. So what? ! Think I want to read about my future in the newspaper next to the comics? My third grade teacher told me I had no future. I run through snow and turn around just to make sure I’ve got a past. My life’s a chandelier dropped from an airplane. I graduated first in my class from alibi school. There ought to be a healthy family cage at the zoo, or an open field, where I can lose my mother as many times as I need. When I get bored, I call the cops, tell them there’s a pervert peeking in my window! then I slip on a flimsy nightgown, go outside, press my face against the glass and wait… This makes me proud to be an American where drunk drivers ought to wear necklaces made from the spines of children they’ve run over. I remember my face being invented through a windshield. All the wounds stitched with horsehair So the scars galloped across my forehead. I remember the hymns cherubs sang in my bloodstream. The way even my shadow ached when the chubby infants stopped. I remember wishing I could be boiled like water and made pure again. Desire so real it could be outlined in chalk. My eyes were the color of palm trees in a hurricane. I’d wake up and my id would start the day without me. Somewhere a junkie fixes the hole in his arm and a racing car zips around my halo. A good God is hard to find. Each morning I look in the mirror and say promise me something don’t do the things I’ve done.

Jeffrey McDaniel, Disasterology

Dear Mom, thanks for giving birth to me and not having an abortion.2% of my time on Earth has been spent inside your body- more than all my girlfriends combined. I enjoyed my time in the uterus, reading what the previous fetuses had written on your walls. That's how I learned to spell. That's how I came out speaking.

Jeffrey McDaniel, Renovating the Womb

In the capital square, there is a picture of Jack Spicer, puking his guts out, his last words—My vocabulary did this to me!—inscribed in the marble base. In nightclubs, supermodels stomp their heels and dream of their small, dark hearts being enlarged with compassion implants, as the poetess gets all the attention. Guys in trendy rock bands mope like damp rats whenever a poet storms in the room. Everyone wants to be a poet, even the coroner scribbling on his note pad at the crime scene: a drowned man is judged only by his piers. Carjackers pause in mid-heist to consider the moon. Hallmark is burnt to a crisp. Bill Knott’s silhouette appears on every other thirteen dollar bill. Homeless people stand in line for Pablo Neruda. In hospitals, they feed cancer patients Carolyn Forche. In churches, there are giant wooden replicas of Emily Dickinson nailed to a cross. Instead of NBC and CBS, there is W.S. Merwin, the Walt Whitman channel, and Sappho at Nite. The Constitution was written by Tristan Tzara. All men are created equal under Dada. The drug czar makes sure everyone gets enough. Lucille Clifton for President! Charlie Parker is the national bird. Howl is recited before pro football games. You can pay for groceries with words.

Jeffrey McDaniel, Poetry Nation

The first god I remember was a Santa Claus god, who you only turned to around Christmas time, who you tried to butter up, and then got mad at if you didn’t get what you wanted. That didn’t make sense. I knew if there was a god, he could see through us, like we were made out of cellophane, like he could stare directly into our hearts the way we look into an aquarium, like he’d know what was floating around in there, like he might be the one feeding it. Then there were those people who used god to threaten you, saying you better be careful—god’s watching, like god was a badass hillbilly sitting in some cloud with a pair of binoculars, a cotton candy beard, a six pack, and a shotgun. Then I saw people who had Jesus’ name on their bumper sticker, like he was running for president. And sometimes those people with Jesus on their bumper sticker would cut you off on the freeway and give you the finger, which is very different from lending you a hand. Then there were people on television, dressed in weird clothes and scary make-up, swearing they had the secret to god, like god was a keyhole and their eyeball was pressed to it, and if I just gave ‘em some money they’d let me look, and then I could see god just hanging around in his boxer shorts, and though I liked the idea of spying on god, I began to wonder if the world would be a healthier place if the Romans had just put up with Jesus and let him die of old age. And then there were the football players, kneeling down in front of everybody, thanking god, like he was their best friend, but then they’d jump up and spike the ball, yell I’m number one, and I’d be confused, because if you’re number one, then what number is god? Then I saw politicians trotting god out on a leash, like a racehorse they wanted to hop on and ride to the finish line. But if they lost it would be god’s fault and god would be the donkey they’d pin all their problems on, and that was very nice of god: to be both a race horse and a donkey. And then there were those who said you better be good on Earth if you wanna get into heaven, like heaven was the United States, and Earth was Mexico, and angels were border patrol. Like when you die you sit in a parked car on the outskirts of heaven, the engine idling, your soul in the back seat in one of those kennels used to carry small dogs on airplanes, as you listen on the radio to all the people you ever wronged testify against you. And then there was the church which was like this cafeteria, where they served god to you on these very un-godlike plates, but I wanted my god pure, and not watered down by human beings, so I just had one of those catastrophe gods— you know, the one you only turned to in an emergency, like god’s the national guard you call in to clean up the earthquake of your life. So I got drunk one night, drove home, passed out behind the wheel, woke up, going sixty straight at a brick wall, slammed the brakes, heart banging like a wrecking ball in my chest, staring at death’s face in the bricks, close enough to see we had the same cheekbones. Now I have a god who’s like a mechanic who can fix anything, so when I wanna chew somebody’s head off like a saltwater taffy, or amputate my DNA, or open my wrists like windows that have been painted shut, I just put my soul into a box, like a busted computer, and haul it in. And he never asks to see my paperwork, or says my warranty has expired. And I walk out feeling better. And I don’t care if he doesn’t exist.

Jeffrey McDaniel, The Foxhole Manifesto

A boy asks his father to spiral a football over a tree to arch it, so the ball will arrive an instant before the child. The child dives. tendons extended, heart bucking hands opening, to clutch what descends from the sky. Your mother left today for the institution. If the ball hits ground, she dies. That December afternoon the boy's mother passed away, thirty-three times in the first hour. Each time he grabbed her head from the snow and ran it back to his father, promised to do better and he did, he ran hard, focused, dove. I caught my mother's skull thirteen times in a row and she's still not coming home.

Jeffrey McDaniel, 1975

For my eighth birthday I got a toy train set my father helped assemble. My job was to hand him pieces of track and re-light the cigarettes that went out in his mouth. Halfway through, I asked him where babies come from. He told me that eight years ago today I showed up on the front stoop in a cardboard box, how he spent the whole afternoon putting me together, just like this train set, that I was probably lucky the box arrived on a Saturday.

Jeffrey McDaniel, Where Babies Come From

It's like escaping a hot, bright room for the serenity of a city at night, covered in snow. People eliminated. A carpet of silence for taxis to whisper across. The world becoming a pleasant dream of itself. The itch of want smoldering to life on skin. Memory sends a chill vanishing between vertebrae. It's New Year's Eve. Hail the Calendar! As if clocks will pause for a moment before reloading their long rifles. Years are tiny freckles on the face of a century. Where is the constellation we gazed at each night Through a bill rolled so tight the first President lost his breath, as our eyeballs literally unraveled? I am alone in the rectangular borough in the observatory, where even fire trucks can't rescue the arsonist stretching his calves in my brain.

Jeffrey McDaniel, Friends and High Places

The family around the table and a silence so compact no words can break it. Not even a pigeon swirling through the window can nudge mother's poorly taped grin. Her face has the euphoric glow of a mathematician whispering a formula into the whorl of a rose. Her eyes are tiny stones testing the black silk bags she lugs them in. Since father banned television the sons stare at the marriage dangling from the ceiling. Each month it sinks another couple inches until it's in their food. No wonder they don't eat.

Jeffrey McDaniel, 1977

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