Poetry

  • Practice for Being Empty

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

  • 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 in the middle                            of…

  • “Before this dream…”

    Before this dream there is a blue dress, a tangle of trees and the distance between voices. There is routine sorting of like things: bank statements, unopened letters, photographs turned inward from     the damp.There are cows in clusters, truck stops, cinder block churches, scattered     tractors and fields cleared and flooded. Before this dream there is a scored…

  • Crime Scene

    You expected to see blood dripping through his clothes                                            —writing prompt from a student so you kept your distanceso you closed your eyesso you ran as fast as you couldthrough that garbage strewn alley,down that street linedwith dilapidated cars.You did not pause to considerthe wound—who or what caused it.You gave him no consideration at all.You were…

  • 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…

  • In White

    a white-trunked white- limbed white-leafed tree white petals sepals white stamens pistils bees inside a white woman pure white body skin hair white eyes white lips nipples blood white grass for the white stones of this white dream

  • Ode to Silence

    Glory to the half rest, to the breath between         the third and fourth beats,               the dwindling arrow of the decrescendo, to the sunrise over Malibu, and its sleeping starlets,        the empty horizon,               the city’s great thought…

  • That Night, I

    carried a baby heart in my pocket neat pink packet that kept beating a quiet music or calling machine with no reception except in my hand that reached from time to time in my pocket and cradled that only connection to what might have been or was it to what might be