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Hey moon, it's just you and me tonight Everyone else is asleep. Hey moon, if I was to fall, I would fall so deep.

-“Hey Moon” by John Maus

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All We Grow is Old 4

City-Girl 7 Dog-Arms 9

Following Rules 10 Soon, Every Tiny Person Inside Me Will Die 12

Popsicles 13 Sheet Cake 14

All of My Teeth 15 One of My Favorites Next to Hank 17

A Love Poem 19 Real Cool Band 20

A Poem Written While Waiting for a Tow Truck 21 The Fourth Quarter of This Fiscal Year 22

invisible 24 Try Drinking Sand 25

I Put My Fingers in Your Eyes 26

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ALL WE GROW IS OLD I don't want to get into an argument be-cause I know I will spend the day angry at five things at once and three of them will be me. We reap what we sow, you know? This is a poem about everybody's grudge. I don't want to get into an argument be-cause I know that anything is possible under the southern cross. We could be having capers but we are talking about if it's okay to hit people who ask to be hit. I could be showing you how the tiny skull of my dog is basically the most per-fect size for any dog-skull to be because it is. I don't want to get into an argument be-cause I have this fear that all of my face-book friends are secretly tall and you have been fantasizing about fucking homeless people and that is probably the kind of thing that should be talked about, right? You’re always forgetting how I’m a blues man.

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I don't want to get into an argument be-cause we have been working so hard to be an animated gif of statues exactly sharing a couch most evenings. This is a poem about how the holiday season is magi-cal. People say all kinds of shit about Christmastime that isn't true and in the process they say some things that are so vital but I think that’s most likely some monkey/typewriter/shakespeare shit. I don't want to get into an argument be-cause yesterday I lost myself walking around the big Macy's listening to John Maus singing lines like "it's just you and me tonight" and everything seemed speci-fically huge in the best way possible. I saw this mannequin that was just a torso and was wearing a nice scarf and sweater and it had a canvas face without features and these strange weathered wood hands.

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I don't want to get into an argument because I saw my dad crying at my grandpa's fu-neral while he was trying to give a eulogy and I can't get it out of my head he was talk-ing about how the most beautiful things are the most average and how he read that in popular science. I keep smelling things that aren't there like I had to change my grandpa's depends once and there was this smell like antiseptic and piss and now every once a month or so there it is again all of a sudden and it's freaking me the fuck out I don't know if there's some ghost or science I don't understand or if they're the same thing like how I read we're like gods or ghosts to single-celled creatures and that maybe there's something that is like that that is like gods or ghosts to us too. I don't want to get into an argument but sometimes arguments just happen like birth-days or dying or bonus experience points or shit fuck damn. I can't take this right now but I don't think that matters I don't think it matters I don't think it matters I don't think it matters I don't think it matters I don't think it matters I don't think it matters I don't think it matters

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CITY-GIRL I used to be a city but now I’m a girl. It took a long time for me to change from a city to a girl and the in-between stages were kind of stupid but it feels good having arms and feet instead of buildings and stoplights. It feels good being my own aldermen and my own slumlord. It feels good being a girl and if you look close you can tell I was a city before. Inside me there are city things going on. Inside me it’s still loud. Inside me there is a woman who loves her dog so much that she filmed it sleeping and projected it thirty feet high onto the side of her apartment building. A dog-eye twitches and a whole window seems to move. The building is dog-breathing.

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Last week there was a nightmare and the whole sidewalk broke in half the long way in front of the building. Birds took turns landing on the break looking for bugs and they found a few. Pedestrians were having trouble and so the woman came out and helped them push their babies and she could feel the babies pushing back.

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DOG-ARMS

I want to have dogs for arms. Dog-arms. I want to open my dual dog- mouths like fists and watch them eat Science Diet. I want to shake your hand with them and tell you good job so your palm can guess what the teeth could do. I want to make them wear outfits and take classes and like children. When I hug you with my dog- arms you will feel warm and embraced and fulfilled and afraid more completely than a hug has ever made you feel before. When I make sandwiches their floppy tongues will leave spittle dots on my paper plate. People will love me for my dog- arms and I will love my dog- arms and I will be kind to them but tell them no when I have to. Kind, yet firm. They will eventually eat me and this is how I will die.

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FOLLOWING RULES

I am following rules. Look at me following rules! I am staying in lanes and fully stopping at signs. ALL signs. I take no chances. I am decidedly not eating silica gel. I am not loitering, soliciting or smoking. Okay I am sometimes smoking but only in my car. Only in my car. I am returning my library books on time. I am reading them fully and finishing them and reflecting on them within the alloted time I have been given to do so and putting them in the drop box (the proper drop box, not the a/v only drop box) with a day to spare in my loan period. No renewals. No bullshit. I am also not swearing in public. I am a fucking good citizen. I am writing my congressman. Not to tell him I want something from him or that I have some complaint. Just tell him he is doing a good job. I do not know if he is doing a good job but I think he should be told he is. I am keeping all of my receipts. I keep them in a hanging file in a file cabinet in my office which I have altered to perfectly fit the dimensions of even my largest receipts.

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I am paying parking tickets. I am not even getting parking tickets but am finding them on other people's cars and paying them. Or I was before I found out that was illegal and now I am just following the signs about parking very closely and not thinking about tickets at all. I am trying to forget they exist.

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SOON, EVERY TINY PERSON INSIDE ME WILL DIE

Lately I've been eating genocide/salads. Larry, I've been eating genocide/salads. Soon every tiny person inside me will die and there will be hundreds/thousands of funerals in my hands and penis. My knees will not have funerals in them. My knees are a wasteland. In my knees it's/barbaric/but/hey/it's/home. I am afraid of my knees. Tiny people who grew up in my knees when they go to my arms everyone is uncomfortable around them and sometimes hostile. I feel bad now for calling my knees a wasteland. I feel bad for the knee people. I will go to the doctor and say doctor I can't get out of bed because of all the funerals in me doctor. I want to die on a table. I want to die on a table in front of people trying to save me. Then after I die, I want my body thrown to vultures. When tiny people die, they are buried in the inside of my skin. Some tiny people believe that when tiny people die they become my thoughts. Is it narcissistic that I think this is a nice idea?

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POPSICLES

It's finally the season for popsicles again. My arms feel heavy like dead caribou and it's finally the season for popsicles. Our mouths are big like two planets aligning and our tongues are like gangster hornets armed with bowie knives and it's finally the season. for popsicles.

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SHEET CAKE

You come from a place with men who own their own bowling balls. Your biography looks like the periodic table of the elements. When you speak it sounds like shaking a bag of marbles. I want to see your thizz face. I want a giant foam check. I want a sheet cake from Jewel with your name misspelled in icing.

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ALL OF MY TEETH

I spent an hour at work google image search-ing pictures of salukis looking majestic and no one noticed. I wish someone would have no-ticed because I wanted to show them the dogs. To point out to them look these are dogs! Can you believe these are dogs and not horses or reindeer or mountain goats or some other kind of thing? The feeling I have about pictures of salukis looking majestic is the way I want to feel all the time. I took my lunch break at one pm so that I could hear Neal Conan's voice on the radio while I ate tacos in my car. The way he says bye-bye to each caller before they disconnect makes me feel like the universe is a good place to live and I feel like if I can maintain focus on Neal Conan and Salukis I can keep all of my teeth in me until I fall asleep at night and then in the morning I can just think about bye-bye and strangely beautiful dogs again when I wake up and do this for the rest of my life or until Talk of the Nation goes off air and Google goes under and I have to find new things and methods.

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Last night while I was asleep I felt a saluki creep into my apartment in the middle of the night and, without disturbing my wife or dog,slide me onto its back. It took me all around my neighborhood and then around the whole the south side of Chicago and I clutched its fur and whispered about pepper spray and racism and dog bloat and everything awful into its ear because I thought it could make these things go away but at the end of the night it just put me back in bed next to my dog and wife and told me bye-bye and I said bye-bye and it was the saddest thing.

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ONE OF MY FAVORITES NEXT TO

HANK Gregory was always one of my favorites because Gregory knew secrets. Gregory knew the secret to shamelessly shitting in the middle of a baseball diamond in broad daylight. He told me it was a fam-ily secret. I didn't know much about Gregory's fam-ily, but he told me once that his mother was a ginger woman who made soup from sticks and animal teeth. He told me the broth was usually wolf blood. He told me sometimes it was hummingbird snot, but usually it was wolf blood and she would stir the soup pot gently in the af-ternoons and sing him songs by Alice Cooper and Bachman Turner Overdrive. Gregory told me all kinds of things. Greg-ory told me that kittens prayed in swear words and that his pinkie fingers were fake and that if he was a drug dealer his nickname would be Gregory the Drug Dealer. He said that his dad once met Prince and beat him in a funk-off. When Gregory told me that I told him I thought he was a liar and he said nuh-uh and I said yuh-huh. I still don't believe him but it doesn't matter because he'll al-ways be one of my favorites.

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Last night I told Gregory that I thought he was my savior. I called him my mysteri-ous savior. Gregory thought about it and said that I wasn't thinking of him, that I was thinking of luck. Luck is our mysterious savior, he said. Luck is the whip that we are ghostriding.

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A LOVE POEM

There are two men in an Aspen grove in Colo-rado and they are touching their foreheads to-gether. Their foreheads are sweaty and their sweat mingles and drips down into the dirt and makes sweat-mud, which is saltier than regular mud. The men's foreheads and the men are in the grove and the grove is shaped like a fore-head. The grove is next to a freshwater lake which is also shaped like a forehead and there is a town on the lake shore which is inhabited by forehead-people. There is a mountain there called mount forehead and deer and bears and raccoons live on it. Somewhere there is a small country whose national bird is the forehead and the men, right now, are only speaking the na-tive language of this country, and they are do-ing the national dance of this country, though they don't know it. I am watching these men from a forehead-shaped hot air balloon hovering over the aspen grove and you are with me and I want to kiss you on your you-know-what.

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REAL COOL BAND

Once I had an idea for a real cool band we could be in. We would have a guitarist who looked like a gaping head wound and Jim would play the polar bear. Jim would play the polar bear until it ate him and we would sound like that time your mom hit you in the kitchen. We would be blog darlings and in interviews we would say yeah a lot and no even more. We would stay home and like dogs and develop poor impulse control and feel like soviet spies that got left at Wendy's with no ride home.

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A POEM WRITTEN WHILE WAITING

FOR A TOW TRUCK Godzilla heard a poem at a reading that was the most boring poem to ever contain the word fart. The poet advertised the fact that it contained the word fart so he could sell the audience on the poem before he read it. The audience laughed respectfully. Godzilla was watching a movie with Mothra, whom he loved, on the couch. Godzilla kept making his eyelids go wide and making mental notes about the movie's plot to keep himself awake. Every time he would start to drift off, Mothra would get irritated. The movie might have been the best movie Godzilla had ever seen. Godzilla has been thinking about it and he doesn't think The Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey could ever, at this point, decombine to form two separate circuses without carrying each other inside. They have been merged so thoroughly for so long that their parts are indistinguishable. Whose elephant is this? Bailey's? Elder Ringling's? No one knows.

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THE FOURTH QUARTER OF THIS

FISCAL YEAR In the fourth quarter of this fiscal year things really went downhill for you. You cut ties with everyone you knew and decided to live in the rafters of the place where you work. You wanted to be come The Phantom Of The place where you work. That, I think, is where things started to really go downhill. You started out dropping staplers into empty waste cans from holes in the ceiling when people weren't looking but that was before the employee lounge fridge ran out of food and you had to start eating mice. Things really started to go downhill once you started eating mice. You tried to keep up the pranks, revenge, you called it. That was before your skin started to change color.

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Things really started to go downhill once your skin started to change color. Sure, before you were pale, but consistently so. But now your fingertips were the color of army fatigues, and you couldn't feel them anymore. You thought there might have been some sort of mold up there in the rafters. But it didn't come off no matter how much you scrubbed. That was before you tried amputation. In the fourth quarter of this fiscal year, things really went downhill for you.

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INVISIBLE

i fucked an invisible man until he was visible again and he twisted each of my teeth out from my mouth wiggled them out into a bowl that he was hold-ing while i was fucking him. he didn't become visible until i came and when i did he _______ _____. _ ___ _______ _ ______ ___ ______'_ ______ __ __ ___ ___, ___ ____, ___ ____. i'm serious. _____ ___ _______ ____ ___ _______ _____ ___ __ __ _____ ____ ______ __ ___ _____ ______ ____ __ ____ ____ ______ __ ___. this is where i lost everything.

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TRY DRINKING SAND

I want to try drinking sand with you, I said. I want to drink sand with you and we could take pebbles like they were pills, but I didn't say that. Stick hairs from the shower drain between my teeth and leave them there like creepy, dislo-cated whiskers for you thinking, I have to check my hair to make sure it's messy okay it's messy and it is your job to shoo birds away from diners' lunches and to deliver sermons in a homestar runner voice. You cannot just sit by and wait for gingivitis. It is important to you to have a large yard. You are so excited about dogs .

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I PUT MY FINGERS IN YOUR EYES

because they were making too much light. I have all these feelings. We shopped in the mall until it closed and bought so many pretzels so many pretzels.

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Russ Woods lives in Chicago. He and his wife Meghan Lamb run a literary magazine called Red Lightbulbs that you can probably find if you get really tricky with google (it’s not actu-ally that tricky). Most of these poems were in magazines before. Specifically, City-Girl was in Spork, Dog-Arms was in Apt, Following Rules was in NAP, Every Tiny Person Inside Me Soon Will Die was in TRNSFR, Popsicles was in The Scrambler, Sheet Cake was in Six Sentences, All of My Teeth was in Rumble, One of My Favorites Next to Hank was in HOUSEFIRE, A Love Poem was in PANK, A Poem Written While Waiting for a Tow Truck was in SLAB, The Fourth Quarter of This Fiscal Year was in Unto-ward, invisible was in secret journal, Try Drink-ing Sand was in Hip Hip Hooray and I Put My Fingers in Your Eyes was in Dinosaur Bees.

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“This book almost made me believe poetry exists.”

-Pete Toms

author of Paws