Poetry

If I said, Your smile glows with empiricism. If I said, You are hydrogen, heliumed by the sun.   If I said, You are both key and prison, claw and feather, absent hum.   If I said, Your breath is opiate paradox. If I said, Your voice is thin as time.   If I said,…

What we remember most is our surprise.   The gardener’s blood-thirst after family was lost to the fight.   Asters went unwatered except by rain.   It may not have been prayer caught in our throat but privilege, or cartilage, or birds.   There are things we did not imagine:   rooftops bloused in ruin;…

We look at each other until the power goes out. Until our eyes become sad hills in an apocalyptic sci-fi thriller. The sound around us is closer to the waving of a wet flag than a fist meeting an enemy’s jaw. In the distance, the lake erases the last of the windsurfers, leaving behind only…

Faces loom and eclipse under heaven’s attentive glare. Hieroglyph eyebrows. Burnished cheek. Dark scribble of beard. He wants to know: How far can you see into me by the roar of this morning’s light? The surface of his lips like the thirsty surface of sandstone or granite. Am I becoming statuary? he asks. Then let…

My dresses huddle in their closet. No histrionics, no tears. They’re undaunted, unhaunted, since you disappeared. Torture by laundry and mothball is all I can offer them, though it’s Christmas. And despite the holiday, there’s endless wrestling on tv. Is that your nudge to me: toughen up and roll with the punches? Here on earth,…

He held my hand on the ride from El Centro past the sugar beet plant     its smell of dying   frogs like the ones we’d dissected in biology lab      the formaldehyde on my fingers   for days     the way lettuce smelled like slicing      or tomatoes     little hearts     They formed a white   mountain     the sugar hulls     sweet climbing hill gated     & locked…

The Houston nightclub, long shut down, where I once spent Friday nights.   Someone shoots up Heaven, both bars and the small dance floor in the back. But the patrons, all just my memories now, ethereal, wisps of smoke and soul, don’t notice or care. The bullets spray through them where they cluster at the…

Fooling around, witnesses said, the man pushing his friend off the dock  with his foot when he couldn’t wake him up. Svedka bottle back and forth  all afternoon, the one passed out, the other working him, cajoling, needling, wheedling, that if he didn’t wake up, wake up right now, he was going  to push him in,…

I The woman who had the job before I had the job was supposed to train me for a month. That was the plan. I would start in July and she would leave in August and we would, like waves, or words, or worries, overlap. But my contract was caught up in an air conditioned…