Poetry

Back when I used to be Indian I am leaning into the shadows, my shoulder against the rough mud and log wall. The old woman’s fingers mumble down the length of her black rosary, her head haloed against the chimney of a kerosene lamp. In his box, resting across two weathered sawhorses, Uncle Big Tooth…

I’m standing amidst the ruins of the Plaza de la Sirena with my parrot, Dr. José Venegas, who I suspect of being tapped into some collective archetypal memory bank with a bizillion other parrots— the way thimble jellyfish are with other thimble jellyfish. He knows colors and can count to ten, nine, eight . ….

I would teach you how to play this instrument which is a little like a violin and something like a flute but diaphanous as watercolor without the pigment but you don’t pay attention . . . When I tell you to count you stare out the window: what could be there if not an immense…

for Mick Vranich   Back when I used to be Indian I am sitting in a booth in a late night café, Chicago draped around me like anxious, wasted breath. Across the shiny tabletop Raven leans toward his coffee, wrapping the white cup with long fingers hardened from bending over sawhorses and hammering guitars. Music…

And up and down the ragged coast gulls draft on the high blue airs, coast the underside of the nimbus drifting past reach, big as a bus on a high and skinny road. Wave goodbye. It is leaving now. Waive any right to see it again. The bright stars, the prickly stars, gain on the…

What a strange time it is. Princess Diana dies. (Not even sure if she’s a real princess although stupidly she was called the people’s princess.) Then Mother Theresa dies. In honor of Diana. (?) Maybe to appease God, maybe to apologize. Then Ted Turner gives a billion dollars (sort of) to the UN. With strings….

Back when I used to be Indian I am stretched out beneath her, the thin white curtains waving like wings above our bed. The drowsy bird of me unfolds into her hands. She grins, crawls over me, shakes her head. The long, black feathers of her hair fall between my teeth as I rise into…

The heart shifts shape of its own accord—from bird to ax, from pinwheel to budded branch. It rolls over in the chest, a brown bear groggy with winter, skips like a child at the fair, stopping in the shade of the fireworks booth, the fat lady’s tent, the corn-dog stand. Or the heart is an…

Washington, D.C. The cabdriver from Sierra Leone, who missed his home, but doubted he would ever go back, maneuvered the car on its bald tires in the snow and slush like a fish through the sparse traffic from Washington Circle to the Museum of Natural History. The people in charge of my country, he said,…