Poetry

The bruised-blue sky, the blown-breath willow, and goldenrod fallen leaves woven with acrylic yarn into your best, most beautiful sweater: the fake wool woodscape felt soft on your skin, no stinging or deep itch, a scene wrapped around your teenage rib cage—all angle tones and autumn. You would wear nothing underneath, felt only the inside-out…

after Attila József In a garden of my own makingThe trees and I will soon be waking.Shyly, I’ll while away the hours­Planting seeds and tending flowers. And so I’ll sow and so I’ll reap,Planting, planting in my sleep.So what if all the flowers are weeds?Don’t all of us derive from seeds? I’ll drink my milk,…

There was no will. Only footwork. In sunless hospital roomsI played card games with men twice my age. Say it wasn’tabout falling but the gated terrain’s arrival after the jump,then I landed not in heaven but in Redding where I tradedmy blue jeans & black boots for a dotted white gown. Here,the men & I…

Maybe it means somethingwhen Jeremiah of the Shopping Cartrolls his chariot across this monster parking lotto ask about my soul again. Maybe I should climb aboard this time—we’ll break Wonder Bread,sip Mountain Dew,toss twelve-packs to the children. Maybe I’ll be a part of some miracle—feel for once,memory resisting her adjectives.Hear dreams changing their minds.Every wheel…

I part the wild horse’s mane      the arms rise and knees sinkand outside the window car hoods      line the DQ parking lotmy knees sink and elbowsbend as I’m told energy held inthe muscle is memory forming      but when I rise the nightdoes not alleviate the heat outside      the hotel where I did not expect      to be — not lost and…

She didn’t know what they were —pebbles—the sounds rolling around in her father’s mouth like sour ball candies when he told her they would find them. Left behind by fairies, he said, in creeks and under leaves. Her father wore that look that said he was teasing, that it was all a joke but come…

In the thicket that is just now considering the poignant slantlight of ebb, one blush rose hip, polished and stalwart. Matt texted me today that he misses you. Something particular or just general sadness, I asked. This is the way for an extinction that cannot be reasoned with. A summer so wet and cold that…

My father is smaller than a potato now maybe in the bluebird’s feather or the beak of the cactus wren but where is my mother? In my fingernail? The crowd of bushtits on the thistle-seeds probably are uncles and aunts from various boneyards with their fetuses whispering together, ensoul, from bad days when they couldn’t…

Prologue: It’s traditional to begin by telling you this: this was once Chada’s sukdu. In the retelling it becomes my sukdu’a. For the unfamiliar, sukdu is story. Sukdu’a is a story that’s become a personal story. I’ve decided that it’s akin to how some people build familial homes. Oh this? It’s our ancestral family home!…