a red serpent lives inside me
keeping venom in my blood
and I don’t mean this as a sin
or shame but rather a reality
like toxins in the grass and
in the fruit we eat, everywhere
everywhere silent killers lurking
in the stems of tomatoes growing
rapidly, the chemicals in me
and in your child, oh god,
there’s a serpent in your child
and if we yank it from his throat
our serpents will bite and bite
until we forget the garden
(originally published in The Beatnik Cowboy, Winter 2024)
Pray to clogged brick, hardened
breathing. When I was young,
I believed in God and my mother
had good food waiting after school.
Rice and chicken, spinach
and pepper at the bottom of a soup.
Boiling then, now I drink water
in mason jars to wash away cheddar-
topped hot dogs I ate in some
destruction of the work Mom
put into me to get me here–
how she unclasped her hands
when I left for LA, let me fly
down the highway of fickle dreaming.
There was light at the end of that;
there’s a light at the end, still.
Now the intangible light swarms
my world, and I am too selfish
in my gluttony to eat it–
how a body can be full of light
but radiate a shadow of another,
one you had no part of in the making.
(originally published in Hessler Street Fair Poetry Anthology, Summer 2018)