Everyone needs a genie and a lamp.
Ancient red handprints in a hard-to-get-to cave.
A wireless charger for their liver
after years of heedless drinking.
Also, not to dematerialize before seeing Venice,
which itself may soon dematerialize
beneath the Adriatic. Upstairs, my brother
bangs the supper dishes. My wish
is to be too drunk to think
about the sermon at the funeral mass,
the priest mumbling no one knew what,
or the coffin fed into the back of the hearse
and driven off with another brother’s body
while his widow went to pieces on the curb.
According to the internet, there are three things
a genie can’t do: no granting the wish for more wishes.
No bringing back the dead. For that,
you’ve got religion. Also, no making someone fall
in love with you. Luckily there are potions,
even if they’re bad for your digestion. I wish
my friend had never been diagnosed with Parkinson’s.
That we still lived together in that house
among the trees. I’d like to go there now
on a magically self-cleaning carpet
for when my dying cat throws up again,
and grieve.

was no consolation to the woman
whose husband was strung out on opioids.

Gone to a better place: useless and suspect intel
for the couple at their daughter’s funeral

though there are better places to be
than a freezing church in February, standing

before a casket with a princess motif. 
Some moments can’t be eased

and it’s no good offering clichés like stale
meat to a tiger with a taste for human suffering.

When I hear the word miracle I want to throw up
on a platter of deviled eggs. Everything happens

for a reason: more good tidings someone will try
to trepan your skull to insert. When fire

inhales your house, you don’t care what the haiku says
about seeing the rising moon. You want

an avalanche to bury you. You want to lie down
under a slab of snow, dumb as a jarred

sideshow embryo. What a circus.
The tents dismantled, the train moving on,

always moving, starting slow and gaining speed,
taking you where you never wanted to go.

For Stella

I dreamt we were already there.
Some things were right
and some were not.

And somehow Tuesday
was Wednesday
was Monday again.

I slept then woke
and then fell asleep again
and when I slept again

I dreamt we were already there.
Things were right some
and were some not.

My father died yesterday, she said.
Yesterday, some things were and.
Today some are not.

I had no idea that the gate I would step through 
to finally enter this world 

would be the space my brother’s body made. He was 
a little taller than me: a young man 

but grown, himself by then, 
done at twenty-eight, having folded every sheet, 

rinsed every glass he would ever rinse under the cold 
and running water. 

This is what you have been waiting for, he used to say to me. 
And I’d say, What? 

And he’d say, This—holding up my cheese and mustard sandwich. 
And I’d say, What? 

And he’d say, This, sort of looking around.