poetry

  [one for adán]   What ridiculous luck to even be born. What ridiculous luck, living long enough to sing how your father was murdered by false policemen. What ridiculous luck to make it through the chorus, the next measure, … Read More

  Ninety-three years old, stains on either side exactly where it would have covered her hips, as if on the last day, she was making bread, staring out the window, with an absent smile, kneading, kneading, miles from the mine … Read More

  “Breastfeeding is a culturally and psychically fraught practice.” —Jennifer Friedlander, Subjectivity   We cry over spilled milk, yell shit at the elbow bump that puddles the pumped sweet gold onto the kitchen counter. Convinced each drop lost is an … Read More

  Because waking up in the hospital, handcuffed to the bed, charcoal staining my teeth, my face blue with death, was no fun. Because dressing up as a woman, learning how to shave my legs while doing everything in my … Read More

  a ghost came to me once a specter shrouded in fog and stared at me through sunken mounds, lifeless caverns hollow like clay caved in by thumbs I don’t know if it could see it had no mouth, so … Read More

  Not the sense of standing alone in front of a microphone, but the adjustments of playing along with a more experienced band. Not the fear of representing an establishment, but of representing it badly, of being inundated and then … Read More

  What if you really had never heard it before? The throaty voice, the credibility And strength of a man who could always pick you up And bring you to that one place and keep you there And never abandon … Read More

  RPM’s throat anger over highway one. Windows cracked seals let in hiss and shiver. Nod your head to exhausts gargle with rhythm like it is song

  could have been raven scraping her beak against granite sparking or dipping crane stirring death from waters dumb floated mush on surface we circulate to shore gather sticks that coil like serpents first words peck and slobber from mouths … Read More

  Hummingbirds are flying to Mexico and out of the blue a postcard, a photographic grid of recent life—you in sunglasses, a giant cactus, children in their striped suits poolside— all centered around a spray of stars above a violet … Read More

  She imagines it is the day she is born. What does she want? What does it cost to be real? Isn’t the wind the breath of the earth? Will she find ever a god who has been stripped of … Read More

  I enter the mouth of the whale. I am the mother-to-be carried   by night. A slow swallowing, down the throat my plump body   goes. Into the hollow, where I smell the cadavers, Lord—   the bones collected … Read More