Poetry

Maxine Waters, being of fire, being of sword Shaped like a silver tongue. Cauldron, siren, Black as tarnation, black as the consciousness Of a black president’s wife, black as his black tie Tuxedo beside his black wife in room after room Of whiteness. My grandmother’s name had water In it too, Water maker. I have…

“Carry on,” they say, Even if you carry nothing But your own desolation, And how much does desolation weigh? It’s like an armload of sirens. When I walk through the meadow, When I walk down the mountain valleys, When I walk in beauty I try to remember who I am. Nothing doing. Out there in…

There are moments I smooth the crumpled folds of my life and read them like a map. Travel all roads at once. I meet you again in a small town we reach from opposite directions, a place where no one knows us yet we’re immediately known: two strangers. The map’s creases make as much sense,…

The baby-faced cholo in front of me gently drops a divider bar between what’s his and mine. On my side, a six-outlet surge protector for my computer, and a fireproof glass cup for my Lux Perpetua candle, a votive so powerful it self-destructs. On his, a plastic bottle of store-brand vodka. It’s noon, but somewhere…

For the families of the deceased buried in Jewish Cemeteries desecrated since January of 2017 They came with small rocks and pebbles to place on the holy ground where gravestones had been turned over and desecrated. They came with their relatives’ plot numbers scribbled on scraps of paper. They came with tears in their eyes,…

I watch the little weasel rise just partly out of a cleft in earth, its face a periscope at sea, this way and that but not slow as an owl does it, the moon behind him in old children’s books, his giant tufted head turning full circle and rich with pause. Because the weasel isn’t…

Almost two thousand years before Da Vinci imagined a machine whose screwlike overhead motor could lift the machine into vertical flight, children in China played with bamboo toys whose propellers, thin and light as dragonfly wings, were set on a sharpened stick and spun into the wonder of an object spiraling in the air. The…

Taller than a man pitched from the earth garbled needle blackened now its volute screed bee- and beetle-ridden up and down between the un- sprung buds, the wild efficient feel of smocked rabbit-skinned explosions poised so slowly on its undertaking that it was so long being true the cold and the craftless was not craft…

Your body— not disappeared into the grave but into   blizzarding swan-colored lines   of lace—holding something like your shape.   And just like flesh you open, absorbing each stray iridescence, each veil of updraft,   upswirl, white noon scattering your edges, you’re something like a dress I can’t put on.   I am building…