The birds are hushed. It’s hot, and I’ve cast off the blankets. I wake thinking of you. I want you to trace words on my

I knew about halfway through. It was less of a relationship and more of a mothering. I picked up your discarded socks before friends came

—- there is an indifference brewing, an apocalypse at the bottom of my cup. ‘I regret to inform you that…’ when the rain falls, I

The antique vase that is trust Is intricate and hard and brittle And once broken It cannot be mended Without eternal reminders of its fall

CW: features wordplay with reclaimed homophobic slur   I saw him— a mirage under neon lights Strobing hues like stained glass, illuminating something holy, divine

trimming curves from corners, you go through that door to find yourself on the other side. it’s not you but it may be you or

If I didn’t run from home and fall onto a university’s doorstep no knuckles to scar my jaw or steel toe in my sternum- I

but he loved her until April: beyond loyalty, letting shower water tell her what I could never say. when the story began, I was still

i Good luck finding your flame when stuck in a retrograde phase. I can’t explain what that means anymore than I can the notion of

if you should stop loving me; I’d understand; I’d stop loving me too, and the asymmetrical jaw of the 5’7 (5’8 in dress shoes) man

My green thumb is brown from loosening the soil, my mother’s red and strained from the shovel she grips. Together we rip tendrils from the

It lives in the kitchen In the cracks in the floor In the time it takes a dishwasher to be emptied In a gas tank

They’ve both seen this movie before, since and again. They never walk out. Mark J. Mitchell Mark J. Mitchell  has been a working poet for

I stand up, clear the plates.                                      

I’m undone. Loneliness has captured me. Salt has lost its taste. I wilt; fingers pruning. I gaze. I see nothing. I see dimly. I see