Poetry

Last night’s rain has filled the fields with cornflowers, blue-bright as moons in children’s books, all milky light. They seem, my father says, the kind of color that could show up in the night. Cornflowers wilt in heat. By noon the sun will burn the fields green, as if no bloom had known them. I…

Here at El Paso airport I wait for Valentina who will take me to the other side to read poems like this one in Juárez Valentina is late soldiers are standing in line laughing teasing one another I was going to write: like hyenas about to smell their prey but I shouldn’t dehumanize them right?…

I saw once, in a rose garden, a remarkable statue of the Roman she-wolf and her twins, a reproduction of an ancient statue—not the famous bronze statue, so often copied, in which the wolf’s blunt head swings forward toward the viewer like a sad battering ram, but an even older statue, of provenance less clear….

Because I could be written anywhere, I loved the hard surface of the blade, my name carved into barn doors, desktops, the peeled face of a shag-bark hickory. I pressed my whole weight into it, letters grooved deep as the empty field rows along Tri-Lakes where I’d seen my cousin Nick buried in ground so…

Sky, cloudless. Light, unhampered as it falls across the mountains, across the lake, across the trees surrounding the lake. Day after day, a woman watches this light move across the landscape. In her story, the hero sails away, saddened, angry— while the light casts harsh shadows. The hero is never seen again. Everyone speaks of…

www.youtube.com So, here’s Edith Piaf, widow and orphan, fists clenched and tipped forward for emphasis: No, she sings, I regret nothing, not the good, not the bad. And you want to believe it too, you’re trying to believe it, and you who should have married or moved sing along. You who could have done more…

I see the lion as the lion sees the girl he slowly devours in a silent film— a flash of sun-torn flesh— before the vision fades. How foolish she was to wander the woods alone, forgetting the warnings, the memory she had of herself before the woods became a thought from which the lion leapt,…

giving over my mode au naturel pure or polluted as I await the unveiling of night’s recycled poetry which resembles our backstory softly rendered contrary for my part so as to make, to mourn to point nude abidance toward freewheeling echo flux that said, we recognize some lucid continuum innermost thoughts taming a restless amnesia…

When the infant head bursts out, the fire begins to die, shoulders, like displaced rocks, find a place to rest until they are pulled, twisted out into the air to steam, then cool. Everything hisses and smokes as when lava finds ocean. Now there is an After. After it is done. After her first minute….