Poetry

  • The Vault

    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…

  • Cultural Revolution

    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…

  • Ars Poetica

    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…

  • Hover

      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…

  • The Gift

    You can tell whether a bird has a mate if there are pinfeathers on its head, new feathers that start out as stubs full of blood then enshroud themselves in a white scaly coat as they grow. Preening releases the feather, but a bird can’t reach the top of its own head. A mate, a…

  • Hello

    I, a deaf man, thank hearing aids for not working, How many insults I did not hear!   in full mystery of personhood I toe, naked,                     talking to you, God, since I am afraid to find myself alone.   I now have 24 hours 00 seconds before two men shove my cooling body into an…