My boots have a horrible odor to them.
The cause ―
manly feet sweat,
a hole at the heel,
and leather
never carrying a particularly
delicate scent.

The aromas together—
quite undoubtedly
paint air at a distance.

Boots like mine are best
left outside small
rooms with no
air flow.

I wore a hand-me-down jacket for years,
given to me with a hole already in its pocket.
Nobody knew, even as my hands shook from the cold.

I used to touch my jacket’s soft innards all the time.
The cotton was compacted
and wouldn’t come apart easily

no matter how much I “accidentally”
let my hand slip in the curious hole
to touch, over and over again,

irresistibly, as if exploring
imagined organ meats
naturally came first among
the exotic perversions,
living in the tide pools
of childhood masturbation.

I looked at every other child in dance class
with their clean white socks on

and stupidly stared down,
as if I didn’t remember my own dingy mismatched pair


with the left sock having that damn hole in it,
big enough for three little toes to poke through.

It wasn’t the first time
I ain’t had no good socks on my feet
and it wouldn’t be the last.

A brown bag of pecans beside the feet

and two pecans in the palm,



means the sweet nut meat of at least one  





as reward
with each pair.

When I was little
and still held
fondness toward outside play,
where tree climbing
meant speaking
with the woodpecker’s
holes and making
wrinkled tree flesh

into a lover’s torso
and pressing hands
against viscous trails of golden blood,
I ate azaleas with my older brother.

We ruthlessly snatched the flowers
from their branches,
like tearing legs
off writhing toads.

We stole the sweet nectar
into our mouths as if
to drug ourselves
into the state of Gods.

Petals were torn apart,
inspecting their miniature pink cheetah spots,
and mashed beneath our feet into a dirty paste
of pink and brown.

We stuck the bottoms
of the stamens
into our mouths,
pretending that they were

toothpicks.and as pollen
peppered our upper lips
and cheeks,
we seduced the monarchs.

I saw a dog’s corpse
on the side of the road
tossed beneath hydrangea bushes,
with fur painted by
dust and clotted blood
and feet caught
up in rigor mortis,  
as if still racing
toward mischievous squirrels.

What I thought were
maggots turned out
to be caterpillars,
and what I presumed were
flies darting
were bees.

They took to the flowers,
thoughtlessly accepting
the macabre perfume.

On a Chicago winter night,
every snowflake falling at a corner
for but a moment,
stands beyond its brevity,
becoming a haloed moon,
in the glow
of an ugly
overhanging
streetlight.