Assumption
La Virgencita appeared on a Tuesday afternoon, voice rasped like a smoker, definitely not the honeyed tones I’d always imagined. Too many hosannas, she explained. I’d wanted an apparition, a bird perhaps, or maybe an image emblazoned on cloth or a statue that wept. What I got was an omen in sunglasses, a fountain of immaculate advice. She kept vigil… Read more →
Heat from the Stove
Most everything held close finds a way to expel itself from here. It may later resurface on a rain-soaked window. Most other times, I’ll never see it again. I practice smiling to strangers, unsure the shape my lips make, convinced they must be red. I’m unsure how often to apply sunscreen. I’m unsure how long to microwave leftovers. Maybe they… Read more →
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 →
The Midway
My sister sits cross-legged on the bottom bunk and lays out a game of solitaire, batting my hand away when I reach out to straighten a card. We’re fresh from a turn at the showers, but our skin and hair still smell of caramel corn and roasted meat. We hear our mother outside, laughing with the other concessions ladies—she knows… 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 →
Sleepskin
There’s a skin from which I’d like to slip to be more here. Here, but greener. Here but limber. Clarified like a lake whose deep down stones seem close enough to touch. When I found the baby snake, it was lying on the road and I lay down beside it in companionable solidity. Daisies rising from our peripheries, the shapes… Read more →
House in the Desert
Pink adobe walls and buckling roof. The stacks of prickly pear on either side of its small frame. The door and windows in perfect alignment like a sad open face. I wonder who lives there, and if it is a woman. And if the woman has fits of anxiety. If she sobs and carries on over the smallest thing. If… 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 →