Somewhere in Arizona
 
dusk swallowed the day
we spent in gold-red dirt
tracing rocks with unsteady feet
where each thin-air breath
seemed as tentative as tomorrow.

So we slowed our pace, you and I,
we […]

The Workers of Macchu Picchu
—After Neruda
Like corn, the mortals were husked in the bottomless
granary of forgotten deeds, miserable events,
from one o’clock to seven, to eight,
and not one but many dea […]

[the roots have risen up away from the trunk]
 
i told my children the roots have risen up away from the trunk and like your brain seeps the tree’s structure seeps as well and searches and keeps searching ev […]

Impostor
 
I am in the dirt and the dirt is in me
I am the flow of me recently

From the valley insignia clay came I
From the mountain foot crust came I

Am I the son of two righteous souls?
Am I not the […]

Still Life
 
In the painting Ram’s Head with Hollyhock
there is a melding of bones and sky
and desert, no beginning or end,
just the eye sockets of a skull
transfixed on the faraway
and in the fo […]

Smoke
 
When it’s almost too dark to see,
my uncle sits out on the back porch,

rolling a cigarette, holding it up
to his mouth for the lick.

He’s trying to remember a boy
from the next farm […]

The Return of the Woolly Mammoth
 
You rarely wore it,
though you yourself chose the color, midnight blue,
and knee-length cut. In derision, you named it
“the woolly mammoth,” pointing to its Pleistocene prop […]

Recently, I participated in a group public reading of poetry at Richmond Public Library in Richmond, Virginia: Memento Mori: 26 poets responding to mortality, impermanence and grief, curated by Leslie Shiel and […]

As Briefly as Salmon
 
clouds part
we drive on rain-slicks of light

cars before us
trailing little rainbows

in tire sprays
fountains from the road

up the shoreline
under the shadow of rain

we […]

Because
For Yannis Ritsos
Because the watcher wrote red on the shop’s wall,
because the half-candle was stolen & sold
for fuel,
because the innocent got hit with a cold,
wet branch,
because the town is d […]

Pecking
 
A pigeon
pecking its tail clean
on a shady tenement fire escape

gives me
pause to feel, in its
twisting instinct, the fact of life

after death—
not an afterlife of mine, but of
its sp […]

Where I First Was Happy
 
The twilight was never silver, but the trees were Russian olives.
I was the only thing that bloomed there.
Grandma’s petunias back by the house were really white,
And the pair of […]

Poets and writers of fiction and nonfiction write with a sense of specific place in all languages. Once place is introduced in the piece, emotions are evoked, and a lot of things can happen in that place. In […]

Flood
 
Small hands pull
a mud-stained pillowcase
across wet ground,
prized possessions,
blessings still bound,

boxes filled with
half-spilled lives,
lugged uphill.

Hear the river roar:
I take […]

I Have
 
I have never been so tired in my whole life.
The mountains run across
the river—pointing
like a knife. Forlorn
boathouses perched out on rotting piers.
Empty lots of naked scrub.
A water to […]

Joshua Trees
 
They are repetitive
across the hills for hours,
stillness in the space around them.
As for the sky, one dark cloud
drawn out as if between
two hands and me underneath,
held together by […]

Thank you to Trudy Hale and the Streetlight Magazine editors for choosing me to be your new poetry editor. I’m excited and grateful to be part of this ever developing and stimulating home for “exceptional tal […]

Letter to the Body
 
If only you were the pure self,
we would not have to bargain or pray,
offer up good deeds for relief of pain, or
apologies for spasms and expectorations.
The cells could absorb and […]