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The piano player has already been shot. He is no longer a musician, less one that sold-out halls. Once he turned the river’s chant into a jazz so fine that fish weeped. Now, he plays only right-handed counterpoint. His left is still paralyzed, even after a year of PT. He only…
The black stallion runs onto the tracks headlong into the train’s cycloptic light attempting to break its horsepower. He refuses to yield to gravity touching his feet and grounding him into mammal again: sweat, hair, lungfuls of air, refuses to slip his nose through another hard halter. His head and hind legs…
It soothes me to keep the clutter of the past in picture albums on my cell phone: mother’s yellow dresses, ashes in weighted urns, brittle birth and death certificates, enough heirlooms to make a portable history, things heavy enough to resist memory’s drift, for when the hills blaze up and I have to evacuate, leave…
Long the land watches for death or harvest amongst the lulling black mounds a slumber in piles, huddled so neatly without blankets from the shivering wind blowing meanly under the sway of the killing night’s climb. Underneath are all bones, life clutching the long tilled soil, the farmer’s harlot oft despoiled, denied wages, seeds…
The Great Horned Night Owl screeches my name and I whisper back that it’s wrong. Look around the block, across the coast there is the soul that you seek. She shifts to the closest oak limb tapping just outside my window. Bruja Buho both witch and owl my grandmother called her, …
It’s easy for them to slip into the ice, the big crack of nonjudgmental water, absorbed entirely in the joy of now. First winter blankets them, then the frost, the quiet, until the last of their woolens, the black and red squares of their scarves, their blue and pink pompoms trailing down become the…
Time flies by in the animated flashes between the silver frames of the train’s windows, moving as fast as each perceived thought, a time machine rattling between future-past: egg sandwiches downed with blue electrolytes, rustling newsprint coexisting with touch phones, the woman in black journeying to a funeral across from the discretely breast feeding mom,…
Strange fruit lives in the bones of black mothers, the blood of their sons, marrow of their daughters. Blue winds drift by full of poplar scents, aromas that never leave the maternal soul. They exhort their sons to be careful, be safe, make it back home. They know they…
I watch my love, almost a mermaid, standing in the kiss of shoreline and ocean, washing sand from her glistening form. In the pause between tides I tie a hope line, strong as my inglorious life, to her toe. She swims through it, hardly noticing my intent, only her friends crowding around, reflecting…
