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 →
Interview with Michael Torres about An Incomplete List of Names, a National Poetry Series winner selected by Raquel Salas Rivera
PAIGE RIEHL: Thank you, Michael, for taking time to talk about An Incomplete List of Names (Beacon Press, 2020). I was so thrilled for you when I saw that An Incomplete List of Names was a National Poetry Series winner. Your manuscript Homeboys with Slipped Halos was a finalist for the Lindquist and Vennum Prize for Poetry with Milkweed Editions… 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 →