Poetry

If I said, Your smile glows with empiricism.If I said, You are hydrogen, heliumed by the sun. If I said, You are both key and prison,claw and feather, absent hum. If I said, Your breath is opiate paradox.If I said, Your voice is thin as time. If I said, Your hands sweep through clotsof memory,…

What we remember most is our surprise. The gardener’s blood-thirstafter family was lost to the fight. Asters went unwatered except by rain. It may not have been prayer caught in our throatbut privilege, or cartilage, or birds. There are things we did not imagine: rooftops bloused in ruin;the enduring, flammable night. There are things that…

We look at each other until the power goes out. Until our eyes become sad hills in an apocalyptic sci-fi thriller. The sound around us is closer to the waving of a wet flag than a fist meeting an enemy’s jaw. In the distance, the lake erases the last of the windsurfers, leaving behind only…

Faces loom and eclipse under heaven’s attentive glare.Hieroglyph eyebrows. Burnished cheek. Dark scribbleof beard. He wants to know: How far can you see into meby the roar of this morning’s light? The surface of his lipslike the thirsty surface of sandstone or granite. Am Ibecoming statuary? he asks. Then let me be monument.Long ago, men…

My dresses huddle in their closet.No histrionics, no tears. They’re undaunted,unhaunted, since you disappeared.Torture by laundry and mothballis all I can offer them, though it’s Christmas.And despite the holiday, there’s endlesswrestling on tv. Is that your nudge to me:toughen up and roll with the punches?Here on earth, another rough era is birthed.Sea monsters burst from…

He held my hand on the ride from El Centropast the sugar beet plant     its smell of dying frogs like the ones we’d dissected in biology lab     the formaldehyde on my fingers for days     the way lettuce smelled like slicing     or tomatoes     little hearts     They formed a white mountain     the sugar hulls     sweet climbing hillgated     & locked beside alfalfa fields      The desert sky roiled…

The Houston nightclub, long shut down, whereI once spent Friday nights. Someone shoots up Heaven,both bars and the smalldance floor in the back.But the patrons, all justmy memories now,ethereal, wisps of smokeand soul, don’t noticeor care. The bulletsspray through themwhere they cluster atthe second bar, blurringtheir bodies as they flirtand throw back cocktailsthat turn to…

Fooling around, witnesses said, the man pushing his friend off the dock with his foot when he couldn’t wake him up. Svedka bottle back and forthall afternoon, the one passed out, the other working him, cajoling, needling,wheedling, that if he didn’t wake up, wake up right now, he was going to push him in, thinking in his own…

I The woman who had the job before I had the job was supposed to train me for a month. That was the plan. I would start in July and she would leave in August and we would, like waves, or words, or worries, overlap. But my contract was caught up in an air conditioned…