Poetry

  • What’s Love Got to Do?

    All summer Papá holds a cigarette out the window of his laser-green Buick, points his lips left to blow the smoke into the mirage of exhaust between rush-hour cars. All summer he listens to La Cubanisima on AM radio exploding with accounts of how Castro took everything we had, how we’d get it back someday….

  • Undertones

    The sail had been drawn into an albino python hung vertically for the town to witness. The sea too shallow to dock. The boat     its chipped purple belly remained somewhat distant     solitary with only its static reflection. The fishermen swam to shore. Dark-brown sand     their patterned trails to the plaza for rest. One wore a…

  • 2 Korean Girls

    June. A white heat. Two schoolgirls with crisp collars tread home on a red road.    Two young boys with crew                                                                                                          cuts yawn in the third tank, blink  from five hours sleep.    Blue dragonflies, girlsweat,    orange dust on Adidases… Green interior. Boysweat.        A twist of knobs and dials. Down the…

  • A Choir of Misprisions

    Gone, the quiet of toads. We used to see them half-burrowed in the powdery dirt. I liked their eyes, the nictating membrane. They seemed wry, a little smug. Like a girl who is double-jointed. Demonstrating that. At recess. Gone the articles, how they coddled their nouns. Or, sometimes, volunteered them. Did I mention the car…

  • At Pine Ridge Pow Wow Grounds

    Everything dies, baby, that’s a fact, but maybe everything that dies someday comes back. —Bruce Springsteen   The bitter glue of snow makes the seven-hour trip take twelve. I’m crying—have been sobbing off and on for more than two days. I’m a pitiful, middle-aged mess. Goggles is in the trunk in a Hefty Bag and…

  • Chrysalis

    Corpses push up through thawing permafrost, as I scrape salmon skin off a pan at the sink; on the porch, motes in slanting yellow light undulate in air. Is Venus at dusk as luminous as Venus at dawn? Yesterday I was about to seal a borax capsule angled up from the bottom of a decaying…