Poetry

Sonofagun, what a rambunctious sun!—  Flaunting its feather boa of cloud, it’s  Done with slumming behind the horizon,  It blazons and hastens the birds to what’s   Blooming. Our backyard’s a carnival,   Carmine and cardinal, ripe apricots  Chandeliering on breezes, ambrosial,  And in this light I believe everything  On this bright and ruinous earth, animal   Or…

The wind is named, like us, for where it comes from. The road is named, like us, for where it goes. All winds are the one wind. All roads turn into other roads. Sometimes I think the road has ended, but it has turned behind me and gone home. Sometimes I think the wind has…

Two thousand lightning strikes from last night’s storm. Nothing unusual but record heat and not the least parched godspit of rain. The clamor of photosynthesis cracks. But the young birds birthed in the last month, hatched into heat with a bird bath and feeders, shiver-begging, unsleek and disheveled— any adult will do. Droves of siskins,…

More and more, when I’m walking—and it seems I’m walking more and more—I turn around Because something has called to me and more And more it’s me as a child back there, walking with a friend or a ball or both—and he’s happy and that makes me happy, even when he doesn’t Seem to know…

The hour splits with dust somewhere between north and south. A pine tree sways, disappears. A palm tree sways, appears. I am an exile from the California of my childhood. Grass whistles between my father’s grave and mine. The wind raises dust on my mother’s house, cloaking the yard. I listen for water trapped deep…

My father was a brown man. My mother was white. My father was a very brown man. My mother was a very white woman. My father was born in the jungle. My mother was born in an industrial city. My heart, my little lion— It beats faster to say these things Even after all these…

The light isn’t right. The glare from the windows pierces my father’s glasses and he squints as I press the button on my phone. Again, he tells me. Take it again. And I oblige, trying to find a position that would hold him as he is now though he is constantly moving to avoid the…

A tiny scarab landed in my hand. I see how this works. God just shrinks smaller and smaller with every chance you let pass, every opportunity to take the message that the horse delivers, “until God arrives as something, in the end, like you,” I said to the scarab, and with that, as if having…

In truth, who has the energy to be evil? One starts, perhaps, with bar fights, But the dentist bills alone have got to be crazy. Your money’s spent before you’ve begun. And who can actually afford a lair anyway? Wouldn’t we rather have that nice, Three-bedroom, two-bath, with enclosed garage, New roof, and exceptional curb…