Tag: Poem
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The Lesson of Our Puddles
Oceans are formed from the dropping of our tears.and in it we must all drown,knowing only the cold and the slow driftingaway of our flesh.We watch our fathers live extraordinary livesbut die ordinary deaths.It sinks our hearts downin the gush of a thousandmemories past and memories to be named,into expectations of what was andwas suppose…
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Lallo Dreams in the New Ways
(I liked the word baize so much that I created a poem entirely around it. Lallo assembles the town in his head all in shades of green, white and gray—grass, walks and streets scarring storieson the old sacred hillsof high steel hutswith Bianco Carrara walls and long hallsfilled with plains of baize tables, silver machinesand…
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We Need to Look Longer
The eye feels the light, the lens knows the truth:The children silentunder a blue tarpamongst the rubble— their little backpacks still on their backs offering the hope they still might stand upthen, the beat—and the realization that will never happen.You want to look awayyet you can’t. You must look closer.You must look for longer.Again and…
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Pact
I make a pact with my younger other self, my familiar in the crosswalk, the boy staring back not longing to be me,wondering where all that nice black hair went in our shadowed time and unwanted trusts, vows not to be our parents and just our mirrored selves. In spite of me/to spite me he…
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KAROSHI (Death by Overwork)
The boxes pile high above his head,beyond his ability to count them,beyond his ability to move them.He will work them. More twelve hour daysfor not enough pay. No days off until KAROSHI-death by overwork. He asked his family to bury him,in his small living room ,in front of the flicking embersof the big flat screen…
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Losing Track of Time
The childless widower in his third age sits beneath the frame of the toy store window looking away into the street while three Teddy Bears, one in a just-right high chair, mourn never being held in small arms.Long after the twilight has passed, under the darkness of the elevated train platform, he will stare, lost…
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Getting Married in the Shadow of Iztaccihuatl
She dreamed that shooting stars would stream the palaba roofson the night of her honeymoon,that Iztaccihuatl would spark embers approving of her love,glistening her wedding dress in ashes and a dozen golden sols. The next day she would drape the vestido on the line, it’s wetness letting the entire Pueblo know thatthere was spotting, consummation,…
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Fallen Fruit
It starts with the apple falling to the earth,dropped after the bite.From the rotting hole on its flesh, the worm wriggles forth to the light.The stem dies.The leaf turns grayand floats away.The worm penetrates deep into the ground,fertilizing the crypt.The Death Moth emerging flies to a veined sky fresh with purple pulp. This earth will…
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Side Effects
In my dreams I ride bicycles. In life, I once knew how to ride them.Now I am old and side effects have my feet missing the pedals and falling down.
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Smelling and Seeing the Brightness of the World
I smell the freshness of uncut spruce un-trampled snowin the whiteness all around me.The hard freeze has piled high the world. I dare not crush it less it reekof cat piss and gasoline. Have I gotten too close or too far?The world is too fragile to be h e l d.Soaked in the river its…
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Trying to Stay Even
In the mild June heatjust outside my windowa mom with strollerraces by menever to be caught.My slow tingling feet envyher swift muscle flow.I imagine her heart beat rapid yet smooth like a robin in flight,mouth full with new twig,no sore wings from miles flown—happy with joyand accomplishment.Yet, my heavy breathfalls heavy and slow,lingering,dropping my soul…
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Sixty Degrees and Clear
Sixty degrees and clear.She dies -morning hospice shiftwhile I’m getting ready to visit her.Waxen in her white bed,arms bruised and quiet now,mouth wide in a gaspas if in scream, as if sayingah, no! Both eyes closed,turned down for my visit,denied all further light,sky or even ceiling.I touch her hand. It iscold. It’s only beentwo hours.…
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Our Last Suppers
They pass the plate between themmother to daughter, father to son,a communion stretching to foreveruntil the plates are fulland father and son retire to the living room to watch the game.The mother advises on the adornment’s of the daughter, the father pats the son for his stratagems of the future.They have always been this way…
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The Promise— More and Less
After, the awe returns with less shock. A father lives in a quiet unannounced moment. At his celebration of life service all the children wear black leather. They refuse to die, be strangers, vow to know their names, remember their world. The sound of traffic on the way back home leads them to a smelly…
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Everything Known Will Be Unknown
Soon, all I know will die, be buried or burnt in the bonfire, lost to senses and thought, become un- known. I will fall to my knees and become a turtle carrying my home on my back. If I cry out, who will hear me? Who will know me, when everything known is gone?
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Bury the Children of War in Their Good Things
Bury them with their Motanka,doll tight in their hands.Dress them in that yellowfleece wanted and put back on the shelf,two wreaths of roses and gerberasadjacent their crypt,filled with their birth smells,the sandalwood, jasmine of the crib,a towel and a bowl of waternear to wipe their tears.Flood the nave lightly dark so they may chase the…
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Ubasute: Carrying Life to Death’s Mountain
I listen to his wheezeand watch the machine ascendfor a full breathe thenfall back down againand know I must trek to the mountain once again.Like my mother, heedless of self and for my sake, will he snap twig after twig to point my safe return?She died clutching a small cross,a loblolly branch,her bones resting on…
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Mothers Can’t Live in Your Future
I treat the future as past,a bright yellow house I inhabited,filled with broken furnitureneeding repair, replacement, to bequickly put to the match or just all thrown out.There is a kitchen with pots and panseverywhere and much flour dusting everything— and bread, bread, bread, so so so much bread. Maybe I will keep that aqua sofa…
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Knowing the Spaces of the World
I wonder aboutthe life of spacesI have passed through.What songs have they heard that I have not? When did the stench of death pass through?The honey scent of life?The particles of the pastlinger in the air eternallykeen to the nose of houndswho can discern every atom of this invisible world thatI can only know via…
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The Dick and Jane Primer of Parental Grief
I open memory to gut it. My dad empties out to a red sea. I can’t swim. He never taught me. The tide flows to the shore and I am saved. I now see my father floating submerged face down. He bloats purple. I think he’s dead. The waves beat furiously against his body. I…
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You Can Never Return and Never Know
Even those who can never go back dream of returning back home, taking the long long way back on a rusty Indian motorbike belching white pass the whitewashed high school, the wounded buildings housing black lung renters choking in the cigarette smog of late winter, pass the signs of the empty supermarket the shredded leaves…
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Making Miracles
She’d get up early and secured the world for Milagro:Making sure the window latched and wouldn’t lose a dream,that the new bread would rise and be ready for tomorrow’s stove, that the kitchen would always smell of promise and hope, the two of them forever making good meals,making familia, in the rise of heaven,that the…
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Buying Shoes in Five Easy Steps
IHe slipped on a pair of silver heels for my mom to try on, and though she was past the time for balls andpageants— she married him anyway. IIWhen I was three years past my first stepsmy mom bought me my first pair of kid’s shoes:brown and white lace-up buster browns that tookfour rabbit ears…
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Everything that Matters
Is this howling coming from my soul’s basement from me?. Or them?The ones who betrayed life, death, me?I’ve done everything expected of a son. Outlived them. They taught me everything—but I’m not even sure I know the truth. I have more questions than answer.Why have I spent a lifetime runningaway from them only to build…
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American Sonnet for Spanish Aunts
Aunts sewed their lives bare.Their needle, thread made rich dressesthey dare not wear,ironed straight all the creases of great rich white silky minds.The Gringos wore their handiwork without praise. Aunts dreamed their small dreams inSpanglish, Castilian, Rioplatense,the unknown languages of hope.They prayed and chanted as they cut, sewed and ironed.To watch them slave away is…
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Choices Too
I see sky from my window.Beyond the fence there are treesand a road that fronts them.Further, I know that there are mountains but I see only hatchlings tweeting from the topmost branches.A car flies by anda birdling falls below the fence.I make a gilded cage from spare bricks and steel.I place the little one insideatop…
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Our Dead Fathers
Fathers seldom die in their own bed.They slip in the tub, choke on a machinein bloodless ways you never imaginedor hoped or feared.Neither a blessing nor curse,just a life cut short or one lived too long. The blood they no longer need is drained to a pail. Arms that held babies and worked all their…
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Cold Snap
A mother out in a cold snapstumbled on an odd little notehalf buried in the snow near her boot.It seemed a bloody torn clothbut opened to a small half wing.She almost, in shock, let it slip her grasp.Yet, it rang a tender bell,for it felt like her baby’s pink palm,even though, the cat was sitting…
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the tongue- knows only- sixty breaths before it lives, before it dies
The tongue remembers all the death it has tasted. It teaches us the name and memory of things. The aquae of the womb’s ocean as it dries in the first gasp of air. The vitae coughing out so the lungs can start its invisible cycles of dying and renewing. The taunt of the nose denying…
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Wide-hipped Mothers and Wives
My mother was a wide-hipped woman. So is my wife. They have cuddled me in the clouds of their bodies. All of my life exists in their bigness, broadness, grandness. All of my imagination cribs in the jiggle of their arms embrace, the wide outlines of their curves, the soft pillow of their stomach. I…
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The Art of Graffiti Removal
I always believed until long after my mother died that she was the onlyperson who loved meand thatmy father was a shriveled man at heart.Once my mother fell hard on the floorand he never bothered to lift her up orgive her a helping hand. Then my mother died andhe tried to replace her,becoming more generous,more…
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Build-a House
I built myself a house to home my lonely bones,a house on a noisy-silent streetopening to a quiet skyin colors my wife loves—mostly a whiteso transparently clearit absorbs shadowsfrom dark yesterdaysand sick brown partschemically cured.I built myselfa house thatunderstands my lousy Spanishand knows my gringo accent needs subtitles. I built myself a house with big…
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Leaves Falling for the Fawn to Graze
Leaves were falling from the great oak at the meadows edge, falling from all the treesthis cold cold night.So many have fallen off,so many were torn off,that the new buds to come were but a memory of a sun that once shoneand gave them warmth,warmth they needed again.They’ve fallen down unaware of the secretblooms yet…
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Dead Old Hearts for Auld Lange Syne
Dead love was the grief that brought her down.She buried him oft in her heart’s graveat night ‘neath the Noble fir near her front door.Dreams had him smiling wide-eyed in the morn. Her da followed rudely into her futureseized by fevers and chills she couldn’t shake.She left him boggin’ near the auld grapeuntil he popped,…
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Winter Solstice
In indifference comes my winter solstice—my life now groping more dark than day— just one less even second now—to a temperate gloom and a forever stasis. I neither want to live shorter than my mothernor any longer than my father—an oh so happy mean is just my preferred destiny— death at eighty on an overcast…
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Dia de Muertos Cancion
I feel my father’s ashes on my tongue.His strange death sitting on the edge of my teeth humming that oldSpanish balladthrough the night’s fog. The song you so hate,yet love.He sings it in his own perfect pitch.He sang it for my mother years ago.I hum it off key, hearing his lies.
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The Gifts of the Magi: An O’Henry Christmas Poem
I don’t remember their names yet I witness their shattered tree being placed in the old bent stand.Its wind-shorn branches supplicate to the sky. Placed beneath its boughs area Red Cross box and stained pics, the bluegrass relics of father, mother and infant son— all exiles from my wife’s side of heaven, huddling like a…
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Living With the Disappeared
Each of their syllables floats into the ether leaving memories of little talks, of things not said, until the letters separate away. mother to other drifting away other, other- “Momi, donde esta?” Father ather falling further down at her, at her- “Papi, quien eres tu?” They didn’t fall. They were thrown to leave me without…
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Son of Monarchs
The monarch flutters above the ash and in its black and orange beautyexists all day and night. It flies up to meet the sun,the gentle maternal hand of life lived in the light.Only the scent of milkweedlures it down to ground for the paternity of feasting and breeding.In its flight between earth and sky, I…
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Leaving Tranquility
Not far from the cove, the stones worn smooth from the tides weeping, the salted breeze, removedfrom all tranquility, is the grand windowed house. The ashes will be spread on the beloved soil,the October browning still green to cover this assembly of forgetfulness. The house awaits the noises of the feast,the jeer, the final clearing…
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Palinode
pal·i·node/ˈpaləˌnōd/nouna poem in which the poet retracts a view or sentiment expressed in a former poem. My father stands in my memory seriousness, good intentions intact. He has shifted in my time from distance to closeness, shed his professional ambition and all his focused successes to enter my life still wearing his white coat and…
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House Ghost
My new home needs some ghosts!The ones that hover in memoryand find their way to the floorboards,a patina of cremains that creaks with old joys, hurts, triumphs and defeats—the bark of good boys sitting patiently in their mahogany box above the dust of Cleopatra in her oaken tomb,always the silent bitch with the sad brown…
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Listening and Searching through the Rubble
They called off the search to wait for the winds to pass,the demolition to collapse the weight of concrete onto flesh to make it safer for the cadaver dogsto locate their scent amidst the rubble.They called their names out bothin English and professional Spanish,mainly for show, mainly a memorial,loudly at first, then just a mumbled…
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Homeless
It’s hard to know home without rootsfirmly planted in the soil of stay, when cancer and cure move the lifeline.and a tornado the geography of property beyondthe winds of summer squalls and hard rains.My heart is not a sedentary plot.it knows no fixed seasons:winters blow into summersand summers into winters not allowing me a crag…
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I Know the Night and Sky
I have cried,I have grievedand therefore I have loved.I have twinned my existence:once in the joy of life and the other in the nacre of cancer.I have seen death, known it’s slow, sad and sometimes violent approachthrough the collapse of everything alive-how it roams throatless,holds tight,then lets go.if there is no heaven full of sunbeams…
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Wrestling With a Stained-Glass Angel
The Holy Ghost is freely pinned as sin is from the Devilamongst the broken back pews of a somnambulant congregationdreaming of the post church pot luck buffet.Release it to the wild,it flies to heaven,anointing a stained-glass angel peeled from the wall as second.The angel says,”You must wrestle me,”I dream of catching the uncatchable,holding that one…
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A Mother’s Bread
All life mother kneaded him from her ma’s-g’ma’s pain and joy,from the bodies who all knew her into the one she knew well,collected from all the raw bits lost, found, saved from breads baked-unbaked,while the yeast swelled her stomach and pocked her skin. She said, “Eat, child,”and he fed ‘till her flesh broke. In the…
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Mother’s Day/Mother’s Day Not
Is it so terrible to mourn a mother,to cry for the ones that shut the door and never returned,those never equipped to nurture a newborn from birth to death,the ones who desperately wanted to be mothers but couldn’t be,those who lost a child or never wanted to be mothers but are—should this be a day…
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Pain Knows the Wolf
I should have broken my back by nowwith my lupine spine, feet screaming as if in a wolf trap. My outrage prowls the low valleysearching the arid land for water to slack the thirst,the howl inside.Once there was real silencebut no answer.Now, rage is my lone truth.The lamb has been eaten.Nothing stays in my broken…
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A Visitor in the Target Moon
Brother, I await you outside the windowamongst the night traffic zoom and scent of pine,story sitting on the throat’s knife edge,the truth unable to roll out from blood fear. Mother, I feel your harsh breath outside my soul.Father, your praise is hidden in the hot stones.Brother, the moon slices you,tripling fear across the unforgettable,a memory…
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Super Nova
I destroy the gold house inside my soul— the nova of light ongold archway, gold mantle,gold walls. The last bits of real places that once shined.l thought, forever in the aura of sun-shine on oncegold rooftop, gold windows, gold doors. Look in,search and see, find: black gold steeped in the darkburned down to ash ofgold…
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On Seeing My Mother’s Clothes on Someone Else
It appears just weeks after the last tear,my mother’s sky blue dress on her life ghost:same walk, dove shape, soft voice, brown hair cut short-at least from behind, in the same love lightthat moved from donation bin, rack, to herin the way that the poor are damned to wear the dead’s clothes, hand me downs…
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When I Am Among the Trees (not after the poem by Mary Oliver)
When I roam the real forestgrumpy apple trees spit their spoiled rotten children on my shoulders knowing I will collect them and mash their cores into cider.Their leaves refuse to form shadows nor shade me, letting the sun scorch my monk’s crown deep cardinal red.The weeping willows shed snickers not tears.The oaks refuse their goodness…
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To Eat a Peach
As I exitthe world of green dinosaursfused from abandoned rusty automobiles and steaming in the sun,a child offered me a giant peachharvested from a Palisade treegrown in the valley’s katabatic winds. It tasted of harsh-sweet stolen pleasures,lust and greed and love and dried fruit,full of Ute tears and diverted waters,memories between prayers and laments buried…
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Always Previously Owned
After Adam died Eve designed a house of wooden ribs. 2 She created it to never burn down. 3 It was full of happy walls and bright colors that never faded. (The next owner painted them gray.) 4 The rainbow colors would daub off on every guest’s fingerprint, an intended souvenir. 5 Nautilus shells placed…
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Homeric Simile
As when his son, a pensive animal lover,on his first hunt,had to face the doe in his scope,his first kill lined up for the taking,breath held firmly before trigger plunge,the forest circling, fear trembling his lips, doe moving from view, gaze,his father behind, a looming granite mountain crushing himlike an avalanche of scold that he…
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The Projection Room
If lucky I will die in a room of non-hospital green, on plump pillows, good linens, with good family and good friends,the ghosts of loves, the odoramaof nitrate seas, forests or mountains on walls.Room where well-cast dreams lived and died. Will my death be the end of a long love,mystery, tragedy or comedy,flashback to life…
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The Dig
Blow the dust of history off our bones. In the excavated ribs of ancient sailing shipsfind the burial chambers of kings. Blow the dust of history off our bones.In the dig just below them, but just over the rubble of the blitz are the cracks in the golden cathedral’s dome.Blow the dust of history off…
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For My Unknown Anniversary
Every year I knowingly cross the unknown date that will complete my tombstone,the day last fires will turn ice and my deafness will make the silence my true and final friend- and I will cradle the earth that cuddles my mother.Maybe I will share that anniversarywith her or some dear friend but undoubtedly with other…
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The Forensic Cleaner
they took the body out but the blood/bloodstain stayed there. the investigation begins. that’s the police’s job. but after the death the cleaner cleans. he cleans up blood, pieces of bone, skin, maggots, flies everything that a corpse/body leaves behind. the smell of decomposition/death will be gone by the time he finishes…
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Only God Knows Dove from Spoon, Man a Hawk from a Handsaw
“I am but mad North North west; when the wind is Southerly, I know a hawk, from a hand saw.” (Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2) Only God sees and knows dove from spoon, can feign the smoothness of heaven, let the mind see hawk and handsaw open in the wide shed behind the house,…
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Dead Flowers in Small Arms
I did want to do it with dead flowers the pressings of leaving here— flowers made of truths held openly in front from a fallow field left to nettles, the broken pebbles hammered by a vengeful sun. I plucked it up, plucked the good root of all our great hopes and best dreams and watched…
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Knowledge
he knows the earth beyond all seeds the earth that is untroubled in the scorch of afternoon light the petals of the angry sun
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Doves Always Return
On the white dry limbs of the sycamore, disrobing bark etiolated in spring flash, three doves roost. “Peace,” they coo to the desire of my heart to calm the violent world so like the Lord’s small ship in the tempest ere the rebuke of wind, sea, the faithless in their fear. I will…
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Daylight Saving Time
The clocks leap forward and I fall back looking for you to return from dust blessedly at the stroke of two this night. ¡Despiértate! (Wake up!) Es muy muy tarde Madre Mia. (It’s very very late My Mother.) Gather yourself. School is over and it is time, not too too late for you to teach…
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The Great Tornado
She knows the winds in the circles of all that’s around her. The funnel is as twisted as the screaming man on the wall hanging in the serenity of white space, crosses and orbs flying up like zephyr elms. Her face breaching its anvil. Her little brick house pirouetting…
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Memory Jug
When I die fill my memory jug with things my mother loved. Leave out her tears, the shivering in the rain. That heart on the silver cross, keep it, the scrap she wrote my future name on, the ink footprints on my baptismal certificate. But not the bandage from my first…
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Flying into the Demilitarized Zone
The eagle brushstroked black talons to beak broke red blue in the white sky tiny scarlet prey fought and died in once soft grasp matron touch a child freely loved plumped fed and feathered in aerie tall safe high from screech and whoop the drop to the loops of barbed wire below
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Bronze Disease
Put two copper artifacts next to each other, and in time, they will turn green from the attraction. Bronze Disease is what the conservators call it. For them, corrosion is the enemy. But that is not true, as poets and most others know: Corrosion is life, Rust is love.
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Never Call the Evil Whales Forth By Name
Never summon the evil whales forth lest they hunger for a salt’s murder or seek to ravage their ship. They cry out havoc, scream tempest to the ocean and sky so the illhveli hear not their name. Their harpooned blubber boils neither to heaven nor hell but vanishes only inside the soul. …
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Self Portrait
I walk from there to there to paint myself into black pixels, my shadow following obediently part of the hobbled sketch. I draw myself as a wobbly line, ill aligned and always misplaced near the horizon Above are scrawled illegible words written in a shaky handwriting, below exists the gurgle of my bowels…
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My Google History
I search Google Sky and there is a night picture. Yellow dots top and bottom in fluttering butterfly waves: too many to count, small red and white dots: 20 per square inch, medium red and blue orbs: 10 per quadrant, red orbs with devil’s tail: 10 falling down red, purple, blue orbs with halos:…
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The World Is Louder than You
Everything louder than the earth spinning under you will make you doubt you are alive.
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Icarus, She Flies
image: Jacob Peter Gowy’s The Fall of Icarus (1635–1637) A daughter dies, and she is found, in the cerulean movements of birds. Not a hawk. Mother Sky says those are for boy’s souls. The father sees mockingbirds building a nest of pine twigs in the corner frieze of the portico and imagines a flash…
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Not a Bird Song
The not not bird listens to its not not song in the not not tree near my not not door. And in its song it hears something not not grand compared to all the other not not birds in all the other not not lands. The not not bird doesn’t know all…
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Persimmons and Pomegranates
I. All through elementary school blonde beautiful lip reading teachers would try to correct my “th”s by snaking their tongues between their teeth and holding it there, ripe cherries tempting me to bite into them. This was the one thing my withdrawn self throbbing with the first thrusts of male enthusiasm couldn’t stop thinking…
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Sentinels
The sentinels stand silently guarding the monuments from rioting against their shadows. One guard counts the sunshine, the other the dark. The piss and shit, the broken glass can never be really cleaned up. The stench just follows the tour through the purple velvet queue. The glass bleeds the feet of those who sold their…
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Where Waldo Is Not
The greatest where’s Waldo paintings to be have him the tiniest spot at the very top in a population of near clones. After searching everywhere he will be the last thing you’ll find, the last thing you’ll see. Your life will have meaning again after generations of searching and playing the game. …
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Housekeeping
We birth a thousand destined broken things: chair legs detach from their seats under the weighted repetition of sitting cloth itself threadbare from the rubbing of muscle. We glue together the blue China fallen in grief. The silver nails of the crib are reserved for our rusty coffins. We mend…
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Steve Earle Sings His Son’s Songs
“Don’t make me bury you,” the elder spoke to the younger over the phone, knowing that his child had inherited all his demons. “I will support you if you want to do rehab,” he whispered, that old Harry Chapin Song, Cat’s in the Cradle, about fathers and sons circling in his head; his…
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A Gun and a Hotel Bible
No bad guy talks alone to a Bible in a hotel room with a gun in his hand. “If a man commits adultery with the wife of his neighbor both the adulterer and the adulteress shall surely be put to death…” the good book says or he thinks in a cold sweat. …
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The Star
It comes like He came on the longest, darkest night of the longest darkest year proclaiming all the glory of God and the beauty of planets and suns. The old gods have been exiled to the sky and their movements are barely the echoes of the Grand Breath. Apollo and Selene have long…
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All Creatures Great and Small
For a week a blue fly buzzed around our apartment subsisting on our Pomchi’s water, kibble and kitchen counter crumbs and dodging attempts by my wife to swat it. I used to catch flies quite easily in my palm and release them back to their natural estates but since my colon surgery the bugs…
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Wolfwalkers
The town exists in harsh geometry, the forest— a fiery flow. The wolf leaps above their soul, a crescent moon. Run the wolf. Flee the wolf. Don’t go beyond the wall lest you be devoured. When the wolf howls they make work their prayer, their protection. They pray a whole…
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A Wedding Dress Story
She didn’t want this wedding dress to be a widow, alone, encased in plastic in the unused dark of the closet, moved after spring cleaning to the basement near the leaky window, after five years moth-balled to the old unopened hope chest of her mother’s closet, weeping, weeping, weeping for the man she lost, subsisting…
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Living All the Eclipses
As the moon dips behind Earth’s faint outer shadow in penumbral eclipse an imperceptible darkness seizes my soul in fear I wait futilely, like the ancients, for the next blood red cycle to engulf the world in ignorance and violence, the next monster to bite the earth into a crescent slice. They once…
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Going to the Sock Hop by Herself
She dances alone, the black child in the yellow dress. Alone amongst the black and white oxfords, the ivory Buster Browns, the brown penny loafers with smiling Abe Lincoln’s looking up to her from the confines of their penny keepers. Her white socks touch the polished mahogany hopping silently to the beats…
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Small Axe: Lovers Rock
The music is the scent in the air that changes everything. “I’ve got no time to lie, I’ve got no time to play your silly games,” it croons with a sweet she reggae lilt pairing off the lovers from the pretenders, shedding bodies to kiss and writhe in adjacent rooms or the nearest alley until…
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Identifying Features
My mother wanted me to go away. I hardly sent her anything. From behind, we all look alike.
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Thanksgiving for Two
Due to the pandemic the children are not coming. The adults will set a table for two and wait for the zoom chat after the game with the Dallas Cowboys and the Washington Football Team formerly known as the Redskins. They will double their Thanksgiving feast of Burger’s Hickory Smoked Spiral Sliced City ham,…
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Small Axe: Mangrove
All you wicked men what is wrong with you? There is no black Justice seen on the Sistine Chapel. Only the stupidities that can make a stuff bird laugh- the small axe ready to cut the big tree down. Based loosely on theSteve McQueen anthology of films. The first in the series is…
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Sitting With My Mother
In the early morning rise, my mother and I take a ride to the hospital where I was born and she has her dialysis treatments. Her feet, wrinkled and bruised, exhausted are raised on a leather pedestal. They remind me of Grandma’s heavy black nylons that pooled around her ankles as she prayed…
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Arcane Torso Mistakenly Posted to Pornhub
The steel bar that holds the torso up gives it a spine and makes it art and not some headless, armless, genital-less mutilation pushed from a machine going faster than the white signs allowed. I see it only on my iPhone, backlit with its perfect abs and cum-gutters not unlike the headless fuckers penetrating endless…
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Defining the Difficult Word Inside Her
I plea for my mother’s spirit to wait for me before the ascension because I want to know more beyond her sun, moon and stars; for her to show me the other colors hidden inside her; shades my crafted words can only reflect in broken shards. She draws me a symbol for a word…
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Meghan Places a Poppy on John’s Grave
On the 11th month, the 11th day, at the 11th hour, Meghan wore her poppy on the right side at 11 O’clock, just like her father, John McCain taught her. Holding her newborn girl Liberty close to her— and taking care not to disturb the many small flags proudly fluttering— she placed another poppy exactly…
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Time Pieces
I. 1. The poem parses time into syllables and the syllables reach out to hold you in the embrace of your grandmother’s words, the light touch of motherly praise, the squirm of a daughter’s protestations, the first gurgling phonemes of the womb advancing to meaning, dissolving to memory. 2. The grandfather clock travels in grandfather…
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Blue Shoe
The blue shoe on the side of the road had me wondering who it belonged to. Yes, shoes are made for journeying, poised for leaping not yet taken. They shine with this potential right off the factory line. Yet, this orphan once so stiff when young, once a tender, warming friend…
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Cairns and Crows
The cairns are mothered by murders of crows— four stones as black as raven eggs, others sky blue with specks of black, pointing this way to heaven, pointing this way to hell, or is it to Tecumseh’s grave, the bones of all buffaloes? But then crows are great tricksters, erecting…
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Sea Church
Rising from the watery mist the grey sea church blesses the waves and prays to the sky, lonely, unadorned, a silver carven wing, folded in limbo, as its sea bells peel out the redemption of sand and stone. Its three pillars drawn from sea’s breath are stained aquamarine, and on its grey stone altar,…
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La Isla de Munecas: A Day of the Dead Poem
Orphaned from the girl who bought and loved them the dolls were packed tightly into a suitcase and floated gently down the canals of Xochimico to the Isla de Munecas and into the waiting embrace of Don Julian Santana Barrera. In the unpacking, a girl doll, a life-size two-year-old, with a dress, hand-work all…