then the oral surgery: my four bad wisdom
teeth ripped from their beds, stitches and bloodgums,
ketamine and skin pocked from the needle’s poke.

The nurse melted into dentist and I couldn’t find
the buttons on my shirt when I woke. In a carport
in Tallahassee I saw the rusted grill and gas can,

the blackened logs in the wet pit, a lone sock
in the drive. Out back by the coop, a hen lifted
her wing over her clutch of chicks, shielded them

from the rain. The miracle of feathers drawing
a single raindrop on course from beak to dirt
while inside we shook like pill bottles. I have a friend

who figured out the password for her roommate’s
dating profile. Each week she took his pictures
and photoshopped his face a little bit smaller.

After six weeks his head had shrunk to the size
of a baseball on his torso. Three months and no
dates he finally figured it out, but now he’s so used

to his profile picture he thinks his normal head
is huge. Once after dinner while I poured
Kahlua into my coffee, Keith passed around

his great aunt’s journal. We touched
the brown pages and the leather binding,
her magnificent looping script. I translated July 19, 1947,

Met Georg today in the Kempinski Hotel. Poor Uncle Hans
never knew about Georg, and neither did my friend until
I was at the family table and could not stop translating

her affair, the dinner ruined. Last night with Georg
he poured two glasses of absinthe, then slowly trickled
water over sugar cubes. Hotel after hotel, night

after night, and everyone in tears but me, reading
that beautiful diary. The green liquor turned to a sudden
milky mint, “louche” he called it. The summer I was twelve,

the lake went thick with grasshoppers. The docks, the boatlift,
the small shed where we kept life jackets and fish nets,
all covered in thousands of insects. I rode my bike on the path

through the junipers and birch trees, beside bogs where
box turtles lay in the sun. It was a game: which grasshoppers
jumped out of the way, which ones popped under my tires.