Category: Poetry

As we lie down to sleep the world turns half away –Elizabeth Bishop   I question whether it’s past time to pierce my ears, dangle silver hoops, feathers, add a small tattoo of a wine- colored bird at the curve of my clavicle, slip on a pair of stilettos, something low-cut. All those years beauty…

for a traveling circus acrobat   You swing here from the East where nothing is dusty — just diesel and domes. Where church spires are syringes flushed from earth like strung-out doves, pinpricked vessels of stupor. Here, cows cluster in gangs. They chaw and low. I wish you’d unhook my blouse, sewn from spit and…

“I will die completely cured.” -Salvador Dali On our last night we stared for five minutes at van Gogh’s Skull of a Skeleton with Burning Cigarette & I asked if he meant it as an anti-smoking lesson. Libby laughed, her hair like Clouds -era Joni Mitchell buoyant as her shoulders shook. We spent that summer…

headline from a small-town newspaper   I imagine your breath smells — though I’ve never seen you close enough to sniff you, or even wave to you from a window of a car, piloted by me or another daylight driver. Though once, long ago, at summer camp, I saw a horse wipe its dripping snot…

I was eighteen when my grandfather gave me the vintage 1974 Leica M4 he bought the year I was born. I hardly took shots with it; I was still afraid of everything then, of breaking that precious hardware my grandfather spent so much money on. Afraid of losing it to the St. Bernard-faced thief skulking…

I went from market to market for years, because Mexico is in its markets – Pablo Neruda inhale   fried pig skin peppers tortillas dirt car tires                                               cigarette smoke dry wood violin strings…

I like football, ketchup on my scrambled eggs. My biggest sin, perhaps, is I speak English to my parents.   I’m a bad Mexican. Yet, I like carne asada over BBQ, Latina women who speak Spanish in my ear.   I root for México in soccer. I’m a bad American, too. I like Sunday morning…

and she laughs. oh, baby—baby, this damn world’s been ending for damn ever. she plunks her translucent body down on your blank side of the bed. you, that other ghost, who did not come to comfort me. the mattress is memory foam and so does not register her weight, but if it wasn’t, it would:…

  For V   The clouds are flaking embers again, evergreens spraining their necks. Words reach my tongue and hatch into a swarm of robber flies. They wilt and crumble in the Holocene sun as it sets within me. Parking lot mountain range of snow, an orangely-lavender contrail that floats like an opposite spirit above…