Poetry

All night, the wildfires burn in Paradise.             You’ve been in Texas for a week           comforting your mother.   Ashes swarm our porchlight in a warm wind.             How long will you be gone? I ask.           You say that you’re not sure:   It’s hard. Her new apartment’s strewn with boxes—             and she won’t…

Look, netted in shadows of dying elms, we study our sandwiches like manuals, unscrew thermos warheads, doze,   hat brims down, while one cups a joint as if it were a hatchling, offering the cinder, its smoke a rope flung   to where I toil astride this trough of what I never want to set,…

And yet, off alone, we were happy with what stayed the same, and we stood there in the space between world and plaything, upon a spot which, from the beginning had been established for pure event. —Rainer Maria Rilke, from “The Fourth Elegy” Translated by Edward Snow     Beneath the highway, the stream was…

Lake-deep black of night and no song we sing will do. After pillow forts, Minotaur       lullabies, glow-in-the-dark starfighters,     shadow animals’ chomp and gallop, wing-     flap and pearl—between flood tide and lightning     bloom, our son keeps awake and smiles, rhymes storm   with remember, bird with brother with Earth. I kiss the rise…

Because Ariel speaks of a king’s son, his boats aflame, crying Hell is empty, and all the devils are here, I ask my son to tell me about love. He chalks crowns and rockets across newsprint, draws wolves, rain clouds, an owlet, says You love me—and my mama. I love triceratops. We try   these…

Mama called me one thing, named me another. Gave me a mouth on my stomach and fed me. Tied my ankles. Lit a fire round me and called it purification. Placed her own veil over my head. Kissed my belly mouth. Said it was good. It was hard to eat and speak. I didn’t want…

I am sometimes in pain and occasionally sit to write my name in dark inks and the brush goes wobbly, as if excited into shapes without me. The crop fields of someone’s childhood still bother the edges of my vision, tawny gridded country, low born, wind gripping the assembled heads of wheat, bristling. One job…

The opening to another country was always inside my father’s mind, in many forms, in dreams: green swords   swirling in a winter mist, colorful moths, sometimes a molar falling out, porcelain clattering onto the table   like a single rung chime. When I come into the house, I am held by him, become a…

now my mother wants to walk out to the rock, the two of us on the wide empty trail, blasted red dust in every direction, fat black flies diving into our faces. this is before she got sick, though i suppose the disease is still there, heat-shimmer under her feet, stones closed over scorpions, over…