Poetry

puñal, adj. desus. I hang at the back of the school ground, my fingers Hooked to the chain-link facing the street, tips white   With my body’s weight. The oak tree behind me bends Down farther each day I visit to smear   My mind on its bark. Armando walks By the basketball field, spots…

distracted by a delicateness i don’t summer with enough the wood goes unsplit and blankets are added to the bed my hands roughened not unlike the sun -cut skin of eva in august, dirt freckled knees and a cobweb of fear about harvest spun in the window under the frame of last winter’s regret she…

I can remember one particular time, in her grandparents’ attic: her legs, slightly older than mine, shaved amphibian smooth, her breath around my face like an evaporated puddle, naked or almost, in semidarkness, her blue eyes dusk. We wouldn’t allow our mouths to touch. She’d hold her hand over mine and tongue her own knuckles….

We fixed binoculars on it. John the Bird Whisperer’s two zero-in guesses— the black kite’s helicopter spin, or swoop   of eagle, a wedgetail obsessed with high mysteries.   Who brought the strongest lens, the steadiest hold, that cloudless morning in Canberra?   Still autumn at that point, going into winter. post-fire and pre-fire. A…

          gone to ash. Someone told us the pond no longer went silver in wind.   Someone told us Eucalyptus melliodora is melleus (honey) and odora (sweet smelling) though            nowhere in the house even under such trees did it not reek of the grate.   John the Bird Whisperer: that golf course saved this whole…

I kneel by the redwood cutting basal roots, taunt slivers that shoot up from the base, and think how this tree is always reproducing. And if I’d birthed that child, the last, or the one before, they’d be grown now, cast off from the shore of my mothering. There’s an odd comfort in knowing my…

I. As a child, my mother boosted me into a dumpster of damp discarded library books. I fished out limericks, and Langston Hughes, and stack after stack of Hardy Boys. Years later, when I came out   to my mother, behind a closed door, I cried like a wolf. I didn’t know it then, but…

and then he turned it upside down in the garage where he considered its half-painted, dull fuchsia, cast-iron belly and drain hole fixed with what looked like a sawed-off copper snorkel, and how it rested on its gunwales that now were gutters. Something to behold so he beheld it.   Its eponymous feet he arranged…

I once believed we all have one chance to love deeply, an opportunity not only in the business of flesh and heart but in the loneliness of the soul, and if we miss it, as I thought I had on June 15, 1976, waking up in my room that fronted Half-Moon Lane, Herne Hill, London,…