Poetry

Sighting the Whale

The mother kneels beside her grieving child, grieving because the whale has not come, because the whales are elsewhere, not heaving clear of the water where child and mother can see them. In the brilliant light of a day at sea, the child whimpers. Her own small sea ebbs and rolls until she spews an…

Reconciliation

Angry at my persistent rejection of what he said Was his love, a skinny neighborhood boy Once held his mother’s kitchen knife To my twelve-year-old throat. This comes to mind Today as I walk past a couple of tough teenage boys Near the local high school, dressed in the same Oversized black shirts and backwards-turned…

Dinner in the Fall

Partially green leaves are falling on Camille’s Italian restaurant where grapes tint our lips, and the linens are more inviting than our bed. Our eyes shine like the blue glaze on our plates. Heat radiates through the shale of my spine now suddenly recalling the black bitter chill of deep sea as if my body…

Neglect

The muscular hollows: eye, lung, heart, stomach, hand. The parts that you enliven: lips, hair, spine. The necessary and cleansing wastes— sweat, blood, urine, stool, and sperm. But certain places of my body are not specified or named until reached by the first unexpected drop of rain, or the careless, accidental touch of your fingernail….

Whoa

I can taste that tongue for me you’ve set to rubbing in your     pocket Like a stone excited cricket, flint you’ll strike when right in     moonsteam: blue Glue, apogee, cunt of night. Coyotes, a fire round in a ground. Much hair is all of your black bones suckling Open in my throat all…

Phoenix

It was the wrong place to look for resurrection. Memorial Day, one hundred four degrees Fahrenheit. Cloudless sky. Square parking lots surrounding new motels. Always more loss required, always. And after, feeble gestures to shape what remains into a marvelous bird. It would have been fine with me to know only enough of grief to…

The House We Pass Through

It is just a family. am just a girl posing at the mirror in a flowered cotton shift, combing back my short hair, deciding whether I’m beautiful. I know the creak in the floor by heart and the hiss of the door behind me, drawing itself shut. When I cross the room, my brothers and…

Analogue

. . . only making love to you wasn’t I curious about the rest of experience . . . —Jane Miller once i snake my dress off i will loll still as volts train my feet to paint opposing murals if a riff of flesh will halve me on this tasty day in the luxurious…

The Gust

In the mind there comes a moment when shadows fall back    like men from a gust of something, when the brain is light as a fly on your wrist— and in the jeweled eyes of that fly you see your own six-legged self white-shoed, dancing, being on parade— the gold tuba grown from your…