Poetry

When I think of perennials, I do not think of you. I do not thinkhoneybees hovering over petals, nor the sex organs of galaxiesof apologies. I think of your mother, rough as an oak’s charmeyes dark & lacquered, two seeds of a riot. She’s not a cronebut she crops weeds, threads her fingers through goldenrod.She…

I leave the midnight to find your beginningby way of a village weathering into ruin,by means of men coerced into combat by way of an empire shepherding the workof death. I am here in California and you arethere in the Annamites. I seek you by way of retreat, refugees fleeing a line of fireby way…

October’s late vermilion, or the sound a cast stone makes in still water,a starkness to mark the loamy edge of becoming—wants a flashof white flank and mane recedingbehind the glimmering scrim, shadows moving in—a chill wind spinningin the creaking treesgathering themselves close—needs a stream, a shoot, a faraway spring, muskof dead and dying leaves—foxfire, brackish…

—Bullwinkle When you dieyou cannot know you’re dead    and no onetries to tell you either. A small treeof memories rustles in your head, whilea Motown song just wheezes. The last thing you rememberis a doctor shrugging off the cure. You feel for the light switchbut only find that token doorless door. The quiet grows like…

For a few months, I lived in a place that was cold. When I stood at thefront door, in the foreground I saw a lawn covered with snow, in themiddle ground a house being built, and in the background mountainsthat were white and craggy, like clean teeth. The house being built wasa box of raw…

I I learn how to breathe underwater—spring vacation, 1978. Aunt Nayyer takes me to the Caspian where the stray herrings die by the sable shore. She raises her arms in prayer for all the bounty we haul home and feast for dinner. Each fish the size of my hand. All brine and grit.Carcasses stack over our palms,their dorsal fins…

slapped me todayopen hand swiftlyacross my face like he did would gunshot flame set the block the nightsky alight i don’tknow why i’m not the only one who mattersthe only one sittingon the bed head in handsshoulders tremblingas water does beforeit falls from a leaf a reply not rushed me stood before me alonei nearly…

When the air is this soft, when insects and birds are the soundtrack, when your skin is dried salt from the sea, and your clothes are strung out on a line in a yard whose path to the road is familiar and empty and open to an ocean you hear butcan’t see, whose wash is alive witha friend who is…

If I knew how to enter this moment I would tell you about my father,who entered a mission in California, went straight to the guestbook,and asked my mother for a pen. He wrote the words shame on andthe rest can be filled in with many words. He said Native Americanswere used by the church, and it is…