Poetry

Squalor

In the beginning, I thought a great deal about death and sunlight, et cetera, cramming each syllable that I could cram into the seconds and brackets allotted me, all for the memoir that wouldn’t be written, all for the movie that wouldn’t be made. Look at the way I ran after you, arms stirring dust…

energy

Sometimes, after snow, you find yourself in a field of laughing gulls shaken and spat in a mass kill and your boots are the only noise. It’s like a bad joke I cannot resist telling. Enough. Hunger is plenty. Everything is dangerous. New moon, the red fox is out walking. Extinction is nothing to the…

Days of Oakland

Now and then, you heard the copters Flying in search of inmates who’d escaped. Mostly, though, it was quiet. At night, outside, The cats would fight and fuck and knock shit down, The couple next door would simmer in heat Or bitterness. Sometimes you saw them, In the window-glass, appearing Like quarter-moons through mist. There…

Practice for Being Empty

I’m only a human. Always is only in me as long as I last. What do I want? Don’t ask. We forget who we are. Conformists all alone looking for a fake mirror and finding it in some poker nobody sitting across the aisle. To be like some other and feel that. While I am…

Waiting at the River

Sometimes, I’m tired of being a mother, weary of holding her in my mind, her words brighter than mine, the light’s movement on the rock. Look, I say, Listen, to what my daughter said. (tired of being) reasonable and calm, answering to Mom and how sweet (the sound) my name in her mouth, her mouth…

Palace

When they run out of meat                men disappear. I chew         my hair, a kind of fullness that is kind, a thread                soup. A nest gathers         its strands inside me. The dead hatch, translucent-eyed,                wire-boned, small         whistling through beaks. We share our (secret)                feast, miles of hair to keep         us warm. I rock on my heels…

Why I Write Poetry

Because my son is as old as the stars Because I have no blessings Because I hold tangerines like orange tennis balls Because I sit alone and welcome morning across              the unshaved jaws of my lawn Because the houses on my street sleep like turtles Because the proper weight of beauty was her eyes              last…