whiskeybot:

Glyph for dry

for hope and

       *

false hope.

A column of answer
swept by heat.

       *

For momentary, for half.

       *

See suicide, like:

halfway down
obliterated by emptiness.

Gone.

       *

child of gravity.

Stranger to the ground.

whiskey-robot:

I am four in this photograph, standing
on a wide strip of Mississippi beach,
my hands on the flowered hips

of a bright bikini. My toes dig in,
curl around wet sand. The sun cuts
the rippling Gulf in flashes with each

tidal rush. Minnows dart at my feet
glinting like switchblades. I am alone
except for my grandmother, other side

of the camera, telling me how to pose.
It is 1970, two years after they opened
the rest of this beach to us,

forty years since the photograph
where she stood on a narrow plot
of sand marked colored, smiling,

her hand on the flowered hips
of a cotton meal-sack dress.  

Sometimes, I write shitty haikus about Norah Jones and send them to my best friend, the high school english teacher, so she can read them to her fifth period troublemakers to warn them that if they don’t pay attention in English class they’ll grow up and have terrible jobs and no money and die alone because they have poor grammar.