Poetry

These thorny ferns are what Kama-pua‘a, the Pig God, looked like when he wished to disguise himself. When he took this form, he had no visible eyes but he could see, no nostrils but he could smell, no bristles but he could feel every sulfur wind that touched his reddish fronds. He looked exactly like…

In my dreams Buffalo Bill busts down my door with his furry voice. It's like summer lightning, but the strike and the brush fire—the oily sparks of buckskin, sombrero and crimson shirt— shriek to the floor and fizzle out before the hungry calm sets in. I am empty as a mountain, choked with scree and…

That great acacia's not growing anymore, the rats are on the limbs, the heartwood diseased, the fallen leaves show rot has replaced the long-lived green, like an emotion that cannot be recalled sufficiently. Yet it stands where it's always been, where the incredible horses graze. They seem never ridden, serene there, only combed and released…

If you expected a recital of weather, wood, water and grass, or a photograph of me, cheeks whittled as peach pits, forgive me. For all I've seen is Indian women gathering flower seeds, their dark arms reaching, their movement as monotonous as the Sierras themselves. All I've become is a mineress: I've washed a pan…

They make pleasure their first food in the morning, They take their iron wings from under the bed And strap them on in the sun, they grow hotter Than the noon light on the Mission. Afterwards they bathe in snow And dress in feathers of mercury—. Each day is the front of war, With its…

Doc Kitchens told me about this trapper he took the appendix out of name Robb Valton the one got his finger cut off but he found it put it in his pocket when he got home sewed it back on the stump part didn't work fell off after a week so he buried it but…

I should have taken her, she was the only thing I saw in Panama I wanted. —Mary Jane Megquier The girl had the aspect of the plantains she squatted over: chartreuse-bright and curious what would follow. “Compralos,” she said, rattling coins in her palm. There were no shadows but her obsidian hair. “Sell her to…

I stood as long as I could on the edge of the pole house, one finger on reality, storms I could count, and a cup of milk in my other hand like a virtue I did not possess but nevertheless, took to my grip. As to the piñon and scrub oak at my feet I…

By then, by the time my brother Was getting married, weeks away from When the old apartment would be pulled down, The evenings were warm and the sounds of Freight trains were absorbed by three oleanders, Whipped by iron sounds and the wind of its passing. By then, by the time I was nineteen And…