Poetry

For weeks, you dug a trench around dead stumps,the crepe myrtle trees in your flower bed,moving the soft earth in buckets,sawing through thicker buttress roots by hand,blistering your palm on a spade,scooping around twisted gnarlssearching for the underneath,the point you could rock the base of the trunkin its hole and roll it away to the…

Imagine how muchwe take into the body Dirt we breathe,insect parts we swallow,hairs in our food,lungs caked with smoke and resin,grief we store in our muscles It’s no wondercells stop dividing,dying off one by one,joints grind down in secret,blood learns silence We carrythe weight of unsaid things,each heartbeata strained apology,each breatha labored remembrance All this…

we were never separateonly misaligned in spin, like particles trained on each otherfrom opposite ends of a question you opened a door & light elongated outward speaking my name in the dialect of atomsyou touch a mirror I bruise your mouth forms regret in my city, the sky breakswhat was said is said again but…

Today, I dust off old prayers, sweep clean the sky and drivethrough a crumbling earth, swallow rivers until the stones achethe way melaleuca soaks up the swamp, beetles steal a host’s skin Where time becomes mastodon limbs blanching in the limitless wind,wind that sounds like an ocean, reciting secrets told to my shadowin confidence, an…

This poem is another womanI read your face, swept in lines you believe will be meant for you: The girl was an ocean of jellies, a spiral of stars left in her wake; galaxies bloom her hidden currentsThe moment hangs weightless, tip-toed off cilia and leviathan bones, storms that split the afternoon sky, rains that…

I.

 The first
          (not your real mother’s
but she took you to raise)
sleeps like ashes in a box,
etching smoothed to a sigh
over years of turning it ’round
holding the stone in her palm
through every Sunday service. 

II.

 Your husband’s,
          cut away in a sterile room
from a swollen, bloodless finger,
a…

There is a bull here in the olive groves
Here, a toreador, blindfold and crown.

Darkness aimed toward sky
 awash with bullets
Butterflies bead and break apart
A body falls like fruit from a tree
 split and nectar spilt
 by hummingbird rushes

This is what satisfies me still
 “Ole” the brush shouts
 “Ole” the skin whispers

I imagine the gunshots in…

The cottonwood never rememberswhere its seeds will fall.They drift, careless as promises,weightless as the breath between I love youand I’m leaving. Today, the sky is full of them—tiny white ghosts pirouetting in the sun,threading through the cracksin old conversations,settling like snowon the ruins of us. Once, I believed love had roots,deep as the cottonwood’s thirsty…

We do not wake from love like sleepor rise from it a fiery bird out of the ashes,but like the dying rise from a bedthey know they will not return to. There is no ceremony to this loneliness,the quiet clang of spoons in a drawer,the tink of glasses in a half-empty cupboard,the breathless hush of…

You are dying even as you do not die,a disease apart from your physical self.Were it a cancer, an unworthiness, even then,I do not know which sympathies would keep. Each of us has their blame,your skin mapping an ocean of morphine,mine the illusion that I have no skin. Somewhere, there is a longitude that splits…