I like America and America likes me.

I start in the garden looking for an issue

and why I need to put these ghosts away.

Before this, I was a petal—you were a petal, too.

I ask a stranger to take a photo of me

and Ghost Cowboy and Bisquick.

Ghost Cowboy leans in with, “We’re dancing

like girlfriends, but we’re fucking like boyfriends.

I’m going to take you out then I’m going to take you home.”

We know where our loyalty lies

and to not being thrown to pasture.

“Plain duty” is a term that is harsh

to the men in a country God forgot.

Bisquick says “The first horse, the dawn horse

was probably a total jagoff.”

Ghost Cowboy is shimmering in the Menards parking lot

when I say I don’t want more than you, I want more of you.

Every girl gets her wish in love with a ghost.

Cowboy is brainstorming quatrains in ACAB sharp,

yakking about a graveplot is class

indifferent and that debt is a stand-in

for the slave driver’s slaps and calls.

He’s got a list and he’s feeding me

my own heart, says writing about him is torture

remembering places and names, grief shapes.

In one life, Bisquick modeled for Levi’s jeans

and wore sundresses and married a famous pop star

and didn’t wake up and in one Ghost Cowboy

was the son of a suburban mathematician

and gambled and had a nose ring

and skinny jeans and went into a Portuguese river.

But here we’re together again.

Revenge is a form of desire with savage verbs,

language a veil. In the next life, we’re Portland moss

oblivious to war. A couple down the line, you love me again

because I’m bilingual, ambidextrous, I understand

pass interference in football and I’ve got a body

that’s first memory wasn’t a violence.

I want to be born off frame where someone’s not even thinking.

I’ll have a beautiful smile

like all my dead friends were buried with.

You’ll ask if I was in the movies

and I’ll say, No, I didn’t get the part.

And I’ll be funnier too, with my hands on your arms

saying, You better get your hands off my potential new boyfriend!

I will finish this book in joy, goddamnit.

I won’t be sad, but I’ll go there every day.

And when we fall in love again

you’ll ask what did I do this whole time you weren’t around?

I got up and I got down.