WANNA BE A BALLER/SHOT CALLER by Russ Woods

I feel like a fucking king. I don’t want to have hiding places you don’t know about. The things I read lately are making me incredible. You are easy to be around. Today I saw a baby and thought about how his face was the size of my palm. I want to touch your stomach. I want to walk around the swap-o-rama and learn to like instant coffee. I want to make pigeon sounds. I am thinking about how much of your hair could fit in my mouth. I want to tell everyone that we fucked. I want to write something that is like the way good pants feel on my legs when I walk. I now understand wanting to kill yourself in the ocean. My only urge to have children feels self-destructive. I want to live parallel lives I can switch between. They would be the same but fulfill different needs.

Russ Woods is a divorced poet living in Chicago. He is the author of Wolf Doctors (Artifice, 2013) and his work is published or forthcoming in Diagram, Mudluscious, Barrelhouse, iO, [PANK], and NAP.