Second Coming
After Mahmoud Darwish our names will not dissipate : we will become air your lungs turn you breathless churn you to produce a feral pulp : activate our water spirits whiteness reckoned we create a Final Passage : our future
Waiting Outside the Ketamine Clinic at Overlake Medical Center
Spring is a brave knot of daffodils and one flowering cherry in a parking lot where I watch patients make their way across the pavement in a cold splatter of rain, gait careful as a cup too full, caregiver gentle at the elbow. But you, my son, are like vapor when you appear at the glass doors, black hood drawn… Read more →
Autumn Zuihitsu
The mythology of our autumn minds, scatter-shot and red-leafy and uplifted, we rely on the black roots winding and stretching from our windows that remind us when leaves should shudder, tumble, tell. We rely so much on every single face but ours. So many smatterings of colors. * I care so much for you. You are a sliver of moon/pie,… Read more →
Patience is a Bird Shoe
That comes from a 14th-century poem too long for me to care to read just yet. If I’m going to read a long poem, it better be something translated from Greek, not a tongue like mine, albeit much different than my tongue. Besides, bird shoe really comes from a Greek philosopher who called it character instead of what I misheard… Read more →
Ancient Bird Songs
A bird once gave me a list of ancient bird songs, a list of songs written in birdsong deemed to be among the greater songs, the classic bird songs. It was a day of curious longing. Winged things cannot be translated. No matter how one tries, the translation will be wrong. But my new friend did not seem to mind… Read more →
Junior Dreams
Of the fish in the Pine Bluff mall. Of being fishbowled in the skylit octagon of a rubber pond, the soft give of the lily pads beneath his hands and feet, the polished echo of a hollow log. Most of all he remembers the cool, dappled surface of the fish’s mouth against his palms, the quiet inside the body. There… Read more →
Untouching
The room could do nothing but remain inside the girl. Here, objects lived resembling sculptures— maybe from another culture that grew extinct on an island floating in an ocean or time before you knew you were looking at them. You could tell, passing the windows, that something was formed inside. Or secreted. The objects returned your gaze, or seemed in… Read more →
Field Poems from Mars on Earth
Mount Teide on the Canary Island of Tenerife is the highest peak in Spain, at 12,188 feet. And the third largest volcano in the world. It is considered active but hasn’t blown since 1909. There is an otherworldly element to it. NASA worked with Spanish aerospace experts on Teide to build a prototype for the data-gathering robot called Perseverance that… Read more →
The Thing About Re-Entry
One and one-half degrees ago, I sought supplementary employment to fund death-wish extracurriculars You’ll get bored said the manager over the phone Overqualified Despite white-hot yearning for endangering my life, I like a brown goldfish in a plastic bowl too aware of its spherical condition, could not contain the exponential need to expand into myself, then outward for too long…. Read more →
Kaleidoscope
The rain stopped, then started again. Nearly indiscernible. From here, with every turn of my head, a mountain ascends. On the street, pigeons strum with emerald, incandescent wings, domesticated to deliver our messages then starved. My sister keeps calling from her kaleidoscope, asking if I can see the colors morph into stars, triangles, diamond maps for her delusion. If you just… Read more →