Poetry

At the Musée Gustave Moreau I looked at all the surfaces while you explained the stories.        At the base of the spiral stairs we bared our eyes at Les Chimères, a painting pale and unfinished.        What a heavy task he set himself to finish with color and form all the empty limbs, I…

“See, one day, not now, we will be gone from this earth where we know the gladiolas.” —Aracelis Girmay But not today. today there is no funeral & no need for a burial shroud & a casket. in this room we are alive—each one of us tending the flowers that bloom on the small earth…

Apparently I am this crying guy, eyes full of analogue world in the gap between olive leaves, acknowledging the sea, acknowledging all is fucked as kids and philosophers say and know best, but okay, for a silver-leafed span, storied but brief in the gap between olive branch and grief, I make this noise. It is…

How long would it take to grow an Eastern White Oak eighty feet tall in your own backyard? And how long might it take to burn one all the way down? Could you shoot that on your phone and let your battery run down until the ash at your feet is cool to touch? Even…

Look                                         even birds sing in mourning. For the first time in years, a dove in the front yard builds nest, quietly patterns her return with bundles, weaves tiny broken things in work of a home. Whereas even the desert still offers itself, a pursuit unfolding unlike our bodies, just constellations or chain link fences. The…

It’s what the phlebotomists always say, gushing  when I slide up my sleeve, straighten my arm  to boast bulging channels evergreen  like spruce, leafy green like a spring mix,  they bubble with delight palpating  each protuberance, each tubular translucence  swimming just beneath my skin, I suppose  they are, perfectly plump for puncture,  these outcurved creeks,…

Does the rabbit know the fox has also turned to snow? You don’t raise pigs for milk. Wind pursues what it has blown away. Rain falls gently on the city and its sirens. We’re more water than dust. Every umbrella is a big top. And childhood is a name for a visionary state. If I…

They call this extravagance a “spectrum.” The pack of lupine howling out a deep-throated blues. The fiddleneck’s golden arpeggio. The hoot of fuchsia emanating from a parliament of owl’s clover. Surely the wild hyacinth didn’t mean to bring me to my knees, but here I am brushing bugs from tiny petals as she wanders from…

Postmarked from the Middle of Nowhere When someone says It’s the middle of nowhere, they don’t mean New York or Boston or LA, they mean where you and I are from—Tennessee and West Virginia, Kentucky and Mississippi and Alabama. Those rural places where our lives are unfolding. Where my grandmother Maria Garcia Peña is laughing…