Category: Poetry

wooden bells over the lavender. in the belfry alcove, the hum of ghost bees. abuela at her loom threads the last butterflies and indigo and hangs the festival chili peppers to dry.   her hands put me to bed with my sisters, Nina Bell and Maya Blue. we crescent each other’s bodies. the blood-purple of yarn tangling…

  The salt you left behind, came back without. Aspirin-clouds. Lion-mouths. The flower. The root.   The bright cry of a christened head. Every ankle on earth. Every wellington boot.   What it’s like to make a rainbow. The moon.   What it’s like to fall out of the world. The moon.   Whiskey. River-weeds.…

My brother and I still reminisce about the year we lived in another family’s attic. For months we dreamt about playing outside our faces pressed up like needy moths against the window’s wintery pane. Every chance he got, our stepfather reminded us to pipe down, our mother hinting for us to tiptoe along the attic’s…

When I said I am doing so well these days, what I meant is I will go back to a humble place. I will get a job in manual labor, in rugged red sand and plains towns. My book of instruction will read, How to Clean a Steam Train. All this, so I may live…

1. If the moon’s surface was composed of waves the way DaVinci thought, sun reflecting moon ocean and our dark seas’ slow shadow, borders might be in temperatures, in currents, in light—the fish sustaining themselves in the cold rock, the warped water, our planet at arms-length like a hot pearl. 2. During red tide, the…

On a forest hike, a man and son stop for lunch. The boy lies back on a rock. They’ve planned to go home soon after tossing scraps. But the man has forgotten the way: the clouds peek over trees; the woman, once his wife, has left with someone else. In his hand, the father holds…

the waters will flow through the gutters with ease without you having to interfere hydrodynamics, you’ve said and the clicks of the emails coming, will silence themselves at least for a time, your head so heavy maybe you can heal, hard as it can be, through the years and you, lying so still, giving very…

Snorts in the passageway, pinches the delicate ones— those who wear the jackdaw’s gray plumage. Kafka’s father and Kafka’s father’s two dead sons. This trilogy in which a Czech accent flourishes, upon which the holy days continue to riffle the year. Can such a man corrupt the liver of a virgin goose? A bread job,…

Grabbing a raincoat, I find a moth and ask: What do you do here in my closet, what of your light– to which he says: At the end of each night, my light goes into my soul, what of yours? The day is then the weather’s blue colors, mirrors and rain, that almost white where…