Poetry

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…

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…

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…

For John Ashbery, in thanks We are long-lived, with bodies that tend to outlast the mind. But not you, Tootsie Roll. You had a holster of highlighters in a million shades, and you’d use them to mark arrangements of blue spruce in a cartoonishly repeating landscape. Fossil teeth, or a dark motif not unlike the…

I might have guessed, running the streets that night,   running each right down the middle, not   meeting a car, rain soaking and so soft, my arms   held out for the last corner to the house,   that the dark figure on the porch swing would be   my mother, the night and…

things might have been otherwise. Everyone remembers that time she walked in with flowers sewn onto the hem of her dress, charming to all but the flowers, and the fingers of outside light now lacking those flowers to act upon, and the passerby bee returning to find nothing there, and the drinking root done drinking….

You took my hand and took me to the train. The sky inhaled above us as we ran. The weather was suspended like a crane. The woman’s hand was taken by the man. The train was in suspension on its tracks. The woman took her ticket from her pocket. You left me at the train…