Poetry

Cyndi Lauper in the living room, my mother cooking liver in the kitchen. I was staring at the sky through the blinds. At five and six and seven, the song again during laps in gym class, pausing a second before running counterclockwise. Knowing that being a girl was temporary but I would remember the empty […]

is the hardest kind. A tube the diameter of a birthday candle, length of a no.2 pencil, sits above lungs not ready to breathe. The baby is stiller than his parents in vinyl recliners next to him, adorned in rubber duck yellow isolation gowns, baby boy blue plastic gloves, faces fearful of being hurt and […]

My sister is on the top ropes, on the arm of our mother’s good couch. She has been battered badly, flung off the ropes, clotheslined, pile-drived, nearly pinned. But the crowds, my other sister, me, a raucous crew of rubber musclemen in speedos have cheered her to her feet.   She’s feeding on our will, […]

I’m dying, everyday, but no one talks about it. There’re scars that can’t be stitched. They extend until the body wants to quit. I look out from the bus window: vintage cars, a dozen of different colors. The road, endless, coaxes thin shadows from withering shrubs. A truck stop lies beneath an enormous sky. Heat […]

Night: scratching or gnawing rises from the juncture of wall and floor. This building’s old, keeps me up with its resident hungers. By morning who knows what to blame? The numbness blooms in two directions, up and down my spine, nape to tail. Women are tuning forks, a friend says, so I guess we can […]

In memory of Julieta Toro   For forty nights my wife dreamed of you, and continues to light a candle each day.   After nine months, the pain is something she can set free, or so she thinks––grief, a small bird whose claws have hollowed out her heart.   The night is long as she […]

Near the driveway my son & I pull up moss beds. We dig along the green row of glass bottles enclosing the garden, & finally feel a hunch of luck after spotting a large rock, glowing with yellow flowers that have fallen from the guayacan. I let my son feel like he’s doing most of […]

(animal) * a heart is entirely something that stops, a dog dies every day the lithic forgiving you back home just come back home * the dead lunge of intonation, and you get your knuckles dusted everyone gets nuzzled down, dirt cozy, disarticulations from your once-living body you’re an animal, you give your atoms back