Idioglossia

A

An expression of misunderstanding or “getting with the drift.” Otherwise, the first and most ambiguous of your siblings.

Agape

Elvis is also dead. I'm taking my football collection and going home: regulation-size, large squishy vinyl, miniature corporate-logoed, beloved decomposing Nerf. They go in the smiling blue toybox with your baby picture. And rhinestones. The situation calls for rhinestones.

Always

It is impossible to pass a monogrammed bowling ball through your wood-paneled esophagus. In either direction. That's why you feel this way.

Appropriation

He’s fish. She’s chicken. They’re fruit and wheat. Where do they live? Together. What do they eat?

Aunt

Living on sugar, hiding the cream.

Backyard

A pile of shit embedded with a crayon. A crunched and vomited frog. Heck, even a mosquito bite on the tip of the glans. No, really. It was always full of horrid potential.

Bastard

One of each day. Synonym for “extol” having the additional sense of standing on a barrier island and feeling one is an active part of the barrier process.

Bedroom

Uphill from the rose garden, further from root vegetables, a house is a house is a house. And carrots are thorns that stick where they're put. Other things are less obviously pinnately compound.

Bone

Undoubtedly involved.

Bughouse

See also bugshit, bugnuts, bugged, buggered, bugward, bugwad, bagged-out, etc.

Cant

The pace you keep. When you speak, the language you speak. Otherwise, you don't speak, and in that sense, you cant.

Cataract

It takes two. Or fake it. (Both positively and in a vulgar sense.)

Chum

In retrospect, there’s a lot of this. Recognition in the past implies ignorance of the present. Future tense implied.

Coffle

To divine from a distance the corpses of murdered priests. You are not required to know what you should do.

The Collapse

Be ye Barysnikov or Yakov ye be.

Constellation

Throwing up strawberries. Don't distract from the beauty by saying "vomit". Sandy and covered in needles, intact in our original syrup, by your side on the side of the road, we beg of you.

Couch

The striped bathing suit on your great-grandfather.

Custody

The baseball fan who shaves a razor ragged. He is subject to your addictions, innovative and banal. There is nothing in the razor cord but power. There is nothing in the fridge but wine.

Debauchery

A close-fitting hat with a visor extending well inward to a more generalized or primitive condition, often as a preliminary to major change.

Declination

The sense that the sun rises in the north, that you forever know latitude, longitude, elevation and cardinal points in relation to your first bedroom.

Diabetes

You catch it from cereal. By extension, a lifelong habit of predicting the illnesses of relatives.

Dream

A family which always drives away its neighbors, but knows where they live from then on and sends them heavy, empty envelopes at Christmas, postage due.

E

Say it again. Say it again and don’t dare stop.

Encyclopedia

The payoff for the stair-top shimmy. But nobody can teach you a damn thing. Nobody can prove you're not Spider-Man.

Explanation

You open the package and it’s not for you.

Fall

Composed of past and present mice—the house's ribs, the house's fluff.

Family

1) Without question. 2) Naked. 3) Alone.

Female

Don't forget you're at issue.

Finger

It speaks French. Unless you speak French, in which case it speaks Russian with a Kazak accent. When you were younger it spoke to you and with you and you pointed stuff out for it to point out, but one day it grew up and turned on you.

Forswear

I am not familiar with your name. Your wallet. Your passage to another country.

God

You're old enough to climb from fence to roof to check behind the chimney but your Frisbee is no longer there.

Gratitude

Her father held her hand. She was not one. She was not. She was not one of those.

Grief

Without water days passed slowly.

Grievance

It is specifically built, holding flowers, and takes your particular hand in a general his and her.

Home

Dark closet behind clean clothes. Behind limbo. Just past a state of uncertainty, just inside a pocket enclosed by uncertainty and solid walls.

Humors

Black bile, yellow bile, Paul and Ringo. And us and us 'til we break up break up.

Intellect

You think you know the flower in your pot. Then it up and dies on you.

Is

Well-water. Hide of the gator which once served as atmosphere. Empty rooms as passages, sparks to the basket of fire.

Issue

It was not our hearts’

Judgment

A sexual perversion where inertia and nurture meet a prefab concrete slab.

Junkie

All other considerations aside, there's something to be said for one perfect moment.

Korrigan

A firm, paralyzing conviction that everyone knows how to get to your house, where you hid your postcard collection, who threatened to kiss you in the backyard tent, what you've tried to forget, where your sentence ends.

A Letter

You’ve a different potion now. Hold out your hand. You’ve a different potion now. Hold out your hand. Hold out your hand.

Luggage

He lied about the contents of his house.

Male

Don’t forget you’re at issue.

Memory

Larger than before, our apartment seemed two apartments joined. We could’ve doubted everything, but chose only the one incident, which sounded like a psychotic episode.

Mother

Transitive and intransitive. Temp to perm.

Nest

Touch and it dies starving.

Net

Clothing doesn’t save you. Knots and buckles turning rope to uncles as old rags to armed guards.

Nightmare

I know you. No, I mean it: I really know you.

Orgasm

I'd walk a lonely mile for a yoga joke.

Overkill

Only fascists think it's anything but funny.

Passage

In temper, she kicks a hole in the wall. Not supposedly, but with some strength.

Prostitution

Just because you're popular doesn’t mean you're going to be happy.

Purpose

Next door, someone collected aluminum cans, naming each one for a holiday. Christmas, sigh, crush. Easter. New Year’s.

Question

There comes a point once you’ve made your point when it’s just plain rude to continue.

R

Is it?

Read

“Railway schedules, baseball scores, and abnormal psychology.” Word by word like the names of the dead.

Reap

When the plow rolls over you, you stand up and make babies. Then you slice them into pieces like some younger, less forgiving plow.

Religion

Just so you know, I am capable of a multiple-year boundary-setting exercise.

S

It is.

Setting

You can sit in dignity at the family table, holiday over your head, turkey carcass demanding respect. But you're still an inveterate smart-ass.

Sewage

Indefinable and omnipresent. Everything which settles and soothes. Float on it.

Shotgun

My son keeps her letters. I forget to write. This

Stuff

Roman decadence in the form of home-canned tomato juice. It's like a mason jar would melt before we'd prove our cut crystal, Lit a Turque, tiki bar, telephone table, sheepskin rugs and chifforobes are all in good taste.

Supposedly

One minute you're addressing the foundation. The next, you've embarrassed your folks at the rally with an inappropriate reference to your foe's balls. In your shiny jacket you peel away like a slug awash in beer. It's always like this. This is how you will always go.

Survival

He held her dress responsible. Holding her, he dressed responsibly. Responsibly, he held her dress. She undressed in response to his hold on her. He undressed, withholding. She dressed and held on.

Syrup

A soup you can make yourself. A pocket soup.

Texture

The brakes catch your continuing fall.

The Thicket

There will be a half-trailer. There will be a double-wide. There will be hyphenates for everyone: half-remembered ho-hum hanky-panky; half-mast fact-finding get-togethers; hush-hush passer-by check-ins; ex-officio bel-accoyles; self-service follow-ups; far-ranging life-size in-depth mind-blowing hard-core pell-mell adjustable-pitch all-weather fare-thee-wells.

This

Too many wells to be a barren land. Too many fat camels digesting mysterious breakfasts.

Ticks

Not the dankest citizens of your best friend's crawl space. Still, there can be worse repercussions than a lifelong obsession with the greased-up lady in the fireman's hat.

Time

Increments of pets.

Toothpaste

What it teaches about ambition. The old-fashioned kind, not modern contraptions to ensure you get every drop of so much less.

Uncles

Endless clown parties.

Understanding

I knew the thing to do was slice fillets for my friends. But when I held him in my arms and knew I had to smother him or break his neck, I couldn’t do it. I looked around for mother.

Valence

Our house lies flat, walls fallen, roof blown away. From the cracks scamper guinea pigs and poodles shaking off dirt and mold. Our station wagon’s been packed and waiting for over 20 years.

The Vapors

Sometimes, just sitting around, I smell rubber friction-burned on ice.

Violence

He passes through. He comes to join the association.

Water

Our green hill leads to a forest. Or runs under. Or our green forest turns brown over the hill. This forest fallen with trees where the hill meets its tall green guts. Where and how should we build our house? Our green hill runs under our forest.

X

Simply, your point of view. Reflexive and derivative, scientific where it is mechanical, Middle Welsh where it is not Louisiana French, biblical and talmudic where it is not augmentative and unapologetically lowbrow.

Xylophage

You chip soup. You bark sherbet. You hack not carve what your host proffers.

Xyster

Really, anything I could say would be sexist. Or at best fraternal. Have you two met?

Youth

Sun, positive, male genitals, spare tires, church keys, pocket knives. Anything that will do in a pinch. Anything you might happen to find in your pants.

Ziggurat

When two sit together, and face one another, and occupy the same space for a time, and compliment one another, and certain passages open, and certain treasures reveal themselves, gold and lizards or golden lizards crawling from room to corridor to steep step, one upon another sitting together there in the tropical moist, and blood sweats between the rocks or a vagrant sits and thinks or a vendor sells hygiene or trinkets to tourists who sit together and face one another and occupy the same place for a time and compliment one another’s treasures, trinkets, or hygiene there at the peak or is it the base with all peaks lost in the block of time when certain passages opened and certain treasures crawled from corridor to corridor to peek out of and into the o'er grown altar born of tiny, complimentary steps.