Self Portrait in a Heat Wave

poetry
  As if the underworld were breaking through, lake beds from Uzbekistan to California emerge relinquishing their litter – suicides, the murdered, the accident prone who one time slipped beneath…

An Octopus Has Three Hearts

poetry
  I was handed down a skewed spine, my father’s melancholy eyes, my mother’s disapproving mouth, hands with skin so fine that I’m impossible +++to fingerprint, the flat certainty in…

Mother Butterfly Hopes

poetry
  Cocooned under the covers, I’m pinned by bitterness, gnawed to the core. The son, Spock, with anger management problems, versus mom, whose reservoir dried up after the water table…

How to Survive

poetry
  Stop doing it just because it is all there is to do, though this does not mean there will be other Things to do: Choose a part of you…

Self-portrait as Aftermath

poetry
  Like a camera whose lens contracts when it’s too bright, I try to mitigate what hurts. I watch the bare branches in pink winter light, a pillow under my…

Amnesty

poetry
  Too whiny by half, that disarray of bluejays— don’t listen. Tree limbs scribble shadows on the street; leaves shuffle. Four trash bins— blue and green—stand equidistant on the curb.…

Whither, Away or Staying

poetry
  Gaudy as the Welsh, old as a lady, too-firmly attached to a creature, the things I have to say for myself are changing, dodging mirrors let’s recall the small…

A Test of the Emergency Alert System

poetry
  This is a double-pane flash flood tornado watch 90% chance of warning || This is the crickets’ quickening chirps Doppler radar failed Rorschach test the storm shudders nuzzling into…

What the Earth Knows

poetry
  This morning I went wild with the ghost peppers. Snipping ten red fruit off a plant in the yard, I held them palm to sky as an offering. Evil…

Farewell-to-Spring

poetry
  It’s got a bloom that won’t let go, a bloom that hangs from a swollen capsule long after loosing its siren-pink flare. A bloom that clings like an indecent…