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Bogotá
Lloras como niña empedernida: La lágrima rasga a ratos la cortina Y me miras, afligida, como si la culpa fuera mía. Me dices, a bocinazos, Que los carros te atraviesan la cintura, Y transitan tu pecho con su chafa montura Para sentarse a cuchichear. Si refundo tu voz entre el largo suspiro …
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Called Olympic
You created me with that thrashing tongue of garbled half-waves on smooth sound stones, aged by thousands of caressing palms looking to skip on Puget’s icy surface. You made my patronymic the peninsula, home to faces of fathers upon fathers— their hands in the murk which I track over your face. Baptized by…
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I Dream of Being an American Man
The desert ground bloated with rainwater dries a day later. Ripped apart at its seams into a matrix of fractures. What is lightning? Plasma? Or the way you stand with your Hips square, eyes level, jaw set. Bare shoulders in a hailstorm, burning. Cracked lips opened wide, burning. Night air after an illness, burning.…
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The Fall of a Rocket’s Empty Fuel Tank
Shaking, shuddering, skyward I crash as if I, alone, can break this glass haze with the fire sloshing in my belly. Every movement, I feel— my breath— arch into the greed of those astronauts, high on my fumes—guzzled and smuggled through my hissing steel veins to fuel our shared madness; I see the stars…
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tonsiled & Venetian Ceruse
tonsiled the slug of your body lies dead upon the floor; it squirms for a funeral without a casket. I make a bad Schrödinger joke: my cat died but did it ever exist? should I…
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Tape Recorder Seance
Whether or not I press play, the tape rattles on; some days, I just hear it in my mind— wandering about by the side of the road, looking, out, out, for a nice place to sit down and witness the reservoir’s slow metamorphosis into sludge. Other days? No. Other days, I pull out The tape…
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Equinox
Lightning and thunder reassert themselves in static blinding booms. Boom. Storm shorts out the grid, so together we hunt for batteries. In the sudden blackness, I scour and squint until you become a soundwave streak of yellow twitching unlike an insulated wire. Jagged nerve. Warm. Salt crust spills from our cheap, plastic shelves…
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What I don’t understand is the beauty
From here the mountain looks like moss, but there are worse things that could look like moss. Bodies, for one. The first time passing most things, I did not know they could be looked at. God, I was so proud. I thought I was pure movement. Like I could prove the world’s ugliness…
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Ghazal for March
A fawn pauses from grazing infant grass. In the distance a train shouts, heralding not spring but its weaker twin. I am in love with beginnings but their bliss is not spring. My friends see hips swing & call it funny how I dizzy & praise God after a breakup, cut free to silhouette…
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death is
a shadow between sponge-molded floorboards and marble countertops, a daffodil that’s shrunken flattened against the ground dismissed until dawn breaks, the splitting of an egg yolk running through the little valleys onto the stone kitchen floor drops of yellow, like petals and liquid sunlight spilling in. or is it more secretive, censored until…
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Bluebells + How to Stop the Bleeding
Bluebells “The temple bell stops— but the sound keeps coming out of the flowers.” – Bashō Truth is the quiet color of the wind over the ocean, the temple on the cliffside, the oxidized bell that sweeps clean the plain. It stops the dust from building up as a patina,…