poetry

She’ll bring a tote to collect weeds & wildflowers. Situated on Embassy Row, liesa club of brains & business cards. Everyone is an expert in everything, especially gettingto their table early & moving their name tent to a new chair: a routine so...

All truths wait in all things—Walt WhitmanI envy surfers (coteries of loose joints) who design their lives around patterns and leave no trace.Rising with the sun (an income of energy), rushing to the edge of a flower-studded cliffwhere no words are needed. Views tell...

The river hides its openingsin the marsh.In this, it forcesme to see.I paddle up the channel.The wind blows off my hood.The tree ahead is leafless.The bird sees me before I knew I had been seen.I am stuck between the shelf of grass and mud and dirt and that white...

"Isle of the Dead" (1880), Arnold Böcklin. Sourced from Wikimedia, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.Is it enough tocall me Amalekite?A treacherous soul harbored inimperfect man. Is evilso...

Eighteen months we passed a handful of seedsback and forth over the same field.You plant it. No, you.Neither of us knelt. The ground stayed open,soft, ready to take whatever we gave it:These feelings. Lord, these feelings!Down there it was quiet. Down there nobody...

Authorities are trying to figure out who stole a 150-pound watermelon worth $1,500WBALTV-11 | 11:31 a.m. EDT September 10, 2013 The sky is dark when he steps out ontothe back porch into his watermelon patch. In a minute, he will find the vine is cut, feelthe dirt...

For my dear queer friend from Lima, Perú, Alejandra Watanabe Farro.¡Con amor y respeto por aquellas pláticas de corazón a corazón! I am like the moon,Soy como la luna,I am like the god Kútsï, the P’urhepecha deity that illuminates the night:I have multiple faces.I am...

How to cook an eggwhen you’re lonely:Crack an egg into a pan. It’s the last one you have and you forgot to pick up more at the store. Eat the egg open-face on toast while sitting on the couch, watching the same movie you watched last week.when you’re watching your...

In the foreground, this chain saw tears and rips.   [PUSH]   Jagged tooth blade, oscillates up/down not pulsing,   [PULL]   but stabbing. Leave here for the ocean in the distance,   [PUSH]   cohered from excess. On one thin veneering...

He walks backward on command, thick fur teeming with grays reversing back to flat.After he’s fed I see him swimming the Pacific in jagged loops and gulp-frantic swirls.He holds my salt in his mouth a red rubber ball. He gnaws at the tides.He moves when I move. When I...

I’m moving a black shadow. The gall sleeps top and toewith the somnambulist and leavesno dissonance.Every year is my last year. Every day is my only day. Every waiting room rotates its available seats. The contestants walk until the music stops, and find no eliminated...

Maybe it was just the Winter,                      seeping through my bones                      into my heart, the grasp of its icy hands                               against my bare neck. But then I woke up in June,                         sunlight bathing me in...