A Year
settles on your shoulders to weep what bones won’t hear to sing grim-lit and groovy to dance a grief subdued descend the stairs like baby hair intransigent as snow that froze time on the sharp blades of your back
Dolores Park Café
Strong coffee laptop ritualistic SundayWindowpane turkey sandwich flashing stoplightAcross street taxi graffiti in resistance isosceles Fragment existence impulsion is implosionIs routine absorbed and how who knew the scarTearing black-and-white photographic winter Dolores Park Café the pigeons at our feet
Bayberry Drive
I attempt many lives at once.The river rocks darken from the sweat of my palms.Crocuses again. The eggshell feathering stillholding in his old bedroom & his dress shirt swaying on the hanger.Going to bed w/o dinner. excruciating, familiar. how many timesare you divided? Looking in photographs for the cipher. I circle the backyard in the afternoon.Trample the parsley. He calls… Read more →
Earthing
the snare of last nightthe tug of the present thenthe thing done five years agoin the canyon tomorrow’s dinnergoing badly already rootsprouts from small woundsI awake with many heads hungrytake showers at odd timesthese small failings lenticelswhere the atmosphere is exchangedI take shape in their languagea millennia of yellow flowers thenwilt the way I ruin the earthjust by livingwatch national… Read more →
Story about Grief
A boy (dark-haired, 10, shirtless) stands on the grassy top of a cliff.After a while, he begins to pick up stones to throw intoor at the turquoise ocean 200 feet below.His stones barely clear the edge and thendrop to the rocks below. He runs closer and closer before letting the catapult of his arm fling.Each time, the stones hit rocks,… Read more →
Ghost-Horse in the Dream-Field (Foster Care)
Did you get the kids to school? my ghost-horse-mind wants to know. The backpack zipper snagged again, I say. Did you take the path above the sandstone silt? asks the ghost-horse, Were you careful through the pocked dust-field, demands the ghost. I can’t remember how it was before the galloping, I reply. Ghosts, ghosts, ghosts! says the horse-mind. I can’t… Read more →
Boulder heart
turn, and I will sprint desperatelungs over legsyour shadow a bouncing searchlight I need timeyour outline, your open mouthyou never let me hide in a gloam of juniper and spruceneedles and moss, damp patchesdecompose the controvertiblebranches alive with antsstepping in time onto highways of my hairmy belly aches to lie quiet, furnitureof bees, blanket of crumbling clay I want the… Read more →
“The Semina of All Things Have a Moist Nature”
(Aristotle) It seems to be true—as Thales put it— Everything is made of waterincluding my bathroom which just flooded.My mirror’s layers now include buckets.Fundamentally water is what freezes in my driveway or falls from yon sky,already solidified. There is no God waiting in my shedto hand me a new snow shovel (my last one was stolen). I do dream my way back to Lake Michigan sometimes, the ponds in the dunes above which float nighthawks in… Read more →
Clean Slate
The first New Year’s I spent alone, I doused everything I ate [on wedding-dinner plates] in grass-fed cultured butter: filet,langoustines, asparagus. Decadence honors our absence, memorialize another night amidthis limbo of emancipation: in three weeks I will be free. [Waiting for the date is like having blood drawnafter doctor’s orders to see if the disease was contracted or in your… Read more →
Fine Things
“It is certain…that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.”— James Baldwin Blue glass coversBlack moth.This glassis translucent,glazed slickin fire so hot,it forgetsits own past Moth fluttersunder the weightof its own. Youwanted to save it,heard wingsbeat, hush-like,but worriedits hunger, worried it wasa hunger meantfor things loved:wool of warmth,cotton quilt,fine things,mementos. And sothe glass stays. We… Read more →