Poetry

I have been living           despite myself my territory hemmed by mud and threat of mud          If there is a land without its own subliminal violences          this night offers no defense of what has died in it          Some things are only nourished in a stutter of kudzu and the inconsistencies of silver the moon shucks off           Casual machines honey…

I’m enthralled by a cartoon’s coercion.   Behind me, seen in the television’s reflection— exaggerated colors, animations—children whispering beside the slumbered old men that gravel-in-teeth language: fuck, shit.     I still yearn for youth, to imagine algorithms of birds, waddling outside on the lawn, the boys chasing feathers, and the girls braiding a mother’s…

Bit by bit I’ll go on surviving.   Love like the sheets tumbled soft.   Miles of snow outside Lisbon. Before turning the camera   to the window, Soon, I’ll let you go.   They say that love continues.   That the ghosts or angels will usher us home.   February again, & the table…

By which I mean I look like that flower that fireworks in mid-sentence in the sky, over the end of a sweaty ball game. The crowd makes its way to their cars while popcorn-spill & multicolored chocolate candies melt into concrete steps. Maybe I mean you make me want to live beachfront—so I can taste…

Georgia, forgive me. For years I’ve carried this grief  like a hoop of bone, framing everything I see: fragments  of water, fragments of earth. No visible wound, no body    to bury, no song for safe passage to whatever the next  world brings. I must be the only person here not asking,  Where are the…

Humpbacks in journey rendered,           in Eastern Australian waters an Indian Ocean air. How pleading             tones jump across continents into rivers of sound scientists call non-           human revolution, perplexes. Perhaps   a singer lost course and migrated           east from Antarctic feeding grounds. Did whitecaps trick or force; before             he forged a life worth its…

In my Fresno, there are no prerequisites, just a frontage road inside the fence flopped to the west. The cover charge for a poetic identity is delegitimized alongside white aesthetics— between the rows welting the earth’s still dust like corduroy.                                 On one side, almond trees, pistachios. Fieldworker housing spray-painted with ads. The fervent recall…

Blame all the wrong books I read at thirteen. Blame my cold blooded birth in late December. Blame the truth for how dark it gets, blame the bite down, the pinned wrists—   dearest, here it is: I wasn’t raised right. But I don’t need a daddy, don’t want some goddamn gentleman. Romance is for…

  1.   A splinter drifts through a soot-slathered sun ray, its light: blue in orange or that orange glowing.   Beside the fence’s sunlit face, wrapped in a calico quilt, my head tilts and I see pressed into tire tread a snow-nibbled leaf.   Nine years afloat, the sky, dressed as water, neighs at…