Sad clowns, the worst nightmare of my childhood, always have a way of showing up in revisionist history. Franz Kline, with his sad circus face. His wife thought Nazis were on the roof. 

Sometimes the paint is sadder than the tragedy, and in that way, it has a sense of humor.

I made a poem out of nothing but the things we put on top of each other. Blankets and guilt and a kind of trickery that’s hard to define. The words like fruit dropping on our backs.

Crying on my bed about his father, my uncle spills red wine all over my white duvet cover. This is a kind of craft. Craft like the woman who kissed a Twombly in red lipstick. 

Hate is a strong word, I remember saying, but you’re allowed to feel it. I shouldn't have given him permission. 

In the family lore, my father punched my uncle on the university quad. I think this made my mother fall a little more in love with him. My uncle dropped acid and passed out on the lawn while I slept in my crib.

The hate grew inside him like mold. 

Donna Haraway says that objectivity is a conquering gaze from nowhere. 

Though there have been dozens of suicide threats, my uncle is still alive.

Why can’t I own my own mind? Why must I rush around like someone who thinks she can fix things?

Claire Dederer says in Monsters: Sometimes the truth is that we are interested in and, yes, even attracted to bad people.

My friend and I toast Carl Andre’s death in Miami. The next day we wake to the news: he had died. Was our attraction to his badness that powerful?

On one hand, truth is the most powerful thing humans ruin with belief. On the other, we must have belief to have discovery. I feel desperate not to be alone. 

My sister’s friend calls me a desperate bitch. She says it with desperation.

The craft is about forgiveness. 

In the future, my family reads my poems. In the future, my family reads these poems and is not upset to see themselves. They take a spacecraft into the future where they forgive me. If I could imagine a future without them, I’m imagining a craft that is honest. 

But don’t say the best craft is to be honest, to be transparent, you desperate bitch. I should ask for their forgiveness now, and not in the future. This is a lie I tell myself. 

Writing cannot be honest. Not with grammar, not with syntax, not with language itself. The structure of language is the sea I must navigate, each lie I tell an oar I pull against the current of what I could say. 

When to lie, when to forgive, when to let the words break. What could I say? Give me the wisdom to know the difference.

I wanted to be a painter for so long, like my mother. In art class with a teacher called Barley, I stood with a brush soaked in salmon. Here? Maybe here? 

My mother asks me to fix her painting. She doesn’t know how. I don’t know how. 

Elaine de Kooning said: If you saw your father blocks away, you wouldn’t have to see any details. You would just recognize him. 

When my mother finally painted her dead father, it was her best painting. 

Elaine de Kooning said: There is a point where any work stops being a human creation and becomes environment or nature. At the same time Elaine was painting her faceless men, Bill was painting his hideous women. 

Who the hell cares what I think. I grow very angry at what I’m reading, the critic who was uncomfortable at the demonstration of weeping at the Carl Andre exhibition. 

Another round of applause for the erasure of entire lives. Accolades for history’s gatekeepers. Instead of learning anything, I spent years listening to a man pontificate about Spivak.

A man at the end of my reading raises his yellow emoji hand. Not to ask a question, to say something. Men can be abused, too. 

The most obvious trope is the hole the size of a football my brother made in the wall. Found art. Ready-made. Shaped by a father’s expectations. Anger as installation. I can keep going. His anger is the performance of his practice. 

My favorite weapon against my enemies is to put their name in quotation marks. “Andrew.”

Revenge is a locked gate. I broke the lock in a way that keeps it more permanently locked. I cannot move through.

Aging is a privilege. Aging is a privilege. Say it three times.

There is a section of my journal I cannot read. The most gruesome of all griefs.

What I do not write is more present than what I do write. 

At a reading, I give a content warning. The poet after me disagrees. Everything should trigger, he says, the point of poetry is to trigger. I don’t recall using the word trigger.

A man slows his truck to take a photo of me. In my dreams I see my own scowling face in his picture. Is that even me?

Beginners recognize beginners. Children run into each other’s arms. If you are not also a beginner, we cannot be friends.

After the Horrible Grief, my dreams went away for two weeks. The earth is much fuller of the dead than the living. If I step all over them, I might start to understand my own weight.