HEAVEN
Hey! that's my boy in jeans /
by river by the /
lake the water /
the fishes the /
special gas station
Look to the Starfish
The Mexican tetra fish is an anomaly. While some river-dwelling tetras are able to regenerate their heart tissue, cave-dwelling tetras only grow scar tissue over the damage. My heart goes out to the cave-dwelling fish. Some of us can only do our best to survive the damage.
Meditation on Maternal Forgiveness
You had never been taught why you had a belly button. Now you understand that your navel is the physical scar of your expulsion from your mother’s body.
The State of Cinema
There are no more blonde women with red lipstick left to walk slick cobblestones alone. The run in her stocking says that the wars have ended. An old man wipes a soiled handkerchief across his brow, smiles at nothing.
It’s Snowing
It’s snowing and I look at him and he looks so sweet with all the white in his hair. It’s snowing and we almost get into a physical altercation
Teacher who is a Mother who is a Teacher
Teacher who sits through active shooter training in the auditorium and is told to examine her classroom for projectiles to throw at a shooter.
Teacher who practices throwing a stapler in her empty classroom.
Teacher who buys a new stapler because the old one broke after she threw it just one time.
Appointments
Someday, she says, the light of other stars will be too far away to reach us. There won’t be enough time left in the universe. And the Earth will be gone then, long gone, but if it wasn’t you could watch. You could watch as each of those little pinpricks of light went out.
Dreaming in Wine Country
This dream is a teenaged revision of terrestrial bodies /
that do not harm. Our eyelids like foldaway flowers. My heart like a
gosling I follow /
expecting your mouth pulling north.
The Sadness Factory
Still, tomorrow the mud /
will evaporate dust back into the sky & the moon /
will be a pill & catch on the throat of the horizon, /
& this helps no one.
IN THE AUTUMN OF MY SECRECY
The people that loved me /
made me lentils and rice, sat with me /
in the quiet that held space like a /
coat around me.
Northbound Highway 101
The two humans stepped closer to one another. The way it would all unfold from here was a foregone conclusion.
There’s something called time
& I will soon fly to meet you in a city
where the seasons are made lazy
by latitude, meaning we will not yet
know each other’s bodies in winter.
Natural Laws
Now we realize. We’ve spent decades trying to undo our ecological handiwork, our scaling up, but at least we have the silk everything: silk blouse, silk pants, silk gloves, silk scarf, the prized silk slip cut on the bias.
self-portrait as a boy languaging through fragmental spaces
the truth is/ my mother still tongues
your name at night/
but no language can translate you back to life.
Squirrelly Girl
It seems as if you’re the only thing alive for miles.
Growing Pains
When Ma burned herself feeding a needle into an open flame, she cursed in her mother tongue, the language of mountains: a lifeline I would choose to loosen.