Poetry

Blood astrology

We’re standing atop the hill watching streaks of sunset fade over dimming buildings, you hold my waist from behind as I make eye contact with a dark blue raven in a tree just beyond the precipice. Farther than the tree you made me kneel behind as the wind lapped at my bare arms and the…

To Hear the Elf Owls

We stand hushed on the patio. Stars fall—bright ash—between branches of the large mesquite leaning over us as the scientist—our unexpected guest—holds high the recording of elf owls hooting he’d magically found in his car. They’re in the saguaro, he whispers. They’ll answer. And silent we listen. Waiting for one then another owl to sound,…

Fort Amanda

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…

Thoughts

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…

Sukdu’a II

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!…

Waiting on the Biopsy

Planes rise from the neighbor’s Norfolk pine As if floating. Sometimes I float too In the brilliant afternoons of not-knowing. As the aftershock of the infusions Lays me back in the cloud of the recliner, I stare with fierce new interest From our glass-walled living room At the world that always continues. I sleep these…