Softly We Sit
After The Gossips, Camille Claudel In a warm, wet walled, roomlightness comesin with steam. My bellyround, backcurved, two triangle breastspoint to my hips. Flanked by two womenwe lean in forbreath rolling off our friend’s lips. Outside her storydoesn’t exist.In here we moan truth. The story is part of the wallsletting in a little light. Our shadowsare all welcome, unsurprising. My… Read more →
Interference Patterns
We nap, cool and dark. Halcyon summer bursts through sky and sidewalk, embraced. Thin window slats diffract worldlines like fuzzy light. Dreams wait within the distribution of paths between matter and yearning, between first sight and unbound lives, apertures and possible light. We awaken to certain unlikelihood— the sun entangles us to your hand warming mine, to oceans like reservoirs… Read more →
Things I Say to My Dead Ancestors Before Falling Asleep
I’m as much a hypothesis as you, as much a tirade against how the stars have been constellated in the daydreams and nightmares of other living beings. I’m shaping my body into parsecs and fathoms and grace notes and ampersands. I am sad because I will one day die without knowing more than a mote or two. And yet I’m… Read more →
Summer Annual
The crabgrass grows over the place firefighters were certain I sat dead in my crushed car. The median where the drunk driver crossed arches up green from fog & sunlight. Six months later, I drive the same highway. This morning, dew drips down from the sunroof, curdles the dry shampoo in my hair into sludge. The cross breeze shifting between… Read more →
The Kind of Morning
i wake as if from another world and there is no way of knowing who i was before the click of your pen roused me from a static spell of dark. it is the kind of morning that sheds when i start, circadian layers unspool between the ribs as my body makes its way across the landing. i do that… Read more →
A Hospital
We can assume we weren’t herefor any real reason other thanto rest but what solace to retchwith a staid view of the riverand psychosomatic barrier islandsof the self the neurasthenic riverainwith its racket of birds impossibleto make out except as swatches of colorimpossible to hear through thick windowsimpossible to wear as these drab vestmentswe hold to us so thinly allits… Read more →
Triple Abecedarian of a Fervent Dream Inside a Nightmare Inside Backwards, Nonsensical Reality
THREE YEARS LATER: Vertigo
(A poem is born outside, hanging by my window; it flirts with disaster.) I remember the first time we went to Central Library in DTLA. We walked around, perused the poetry and children’s section. This was where we belonged: we were delicate and foolish like the brittle petals of an autumnal wildflower, like an adobe-vintage-vase filled with salted caramel ice-cream… Read more →
Reading Diane Seuss While Coral Reefs Bleach
Manatee Bay heated like a kettle, while I watered wilting zinnias, yearned to turn back the tick-tock climate clock, only hope won’t deliver the cool I long for firefly nights thrum, oh— what a moon, silvering bluegrass. I shinnied up the Ash tree and afterward, had endless, steamy-mirror-crying showers. I smell the campfire sluicing off tangles, am still tasting grape… Read more →