Wherever I walk is without
consequence. Skid Row,
alleyways, abandoned
lots of Walmarts. I was a kid
just wandering.
Believing I was in
the Mark Strand
poem. I thought
the absence of field
was wherever
I occupied.
I’ve learned
this is not true.
The absence
of field is everywhere.
But my way of
living
is not the world.
(originally published in Perceptions Magazine, Spring 2022)
nights of cats following cliché heartbreak
both of us single lonely ditched by friends
we smoked weed in your empty pizza
box apartment of turquoise walls I threw
myself into the cats were fighting over
string and I asked how often must we
wake up not in love you said we have
been recently while our phones lit
our faces grim in the dark of tangled
connection I wanted you to come
to Cali with me and we went west
but you stayed in Colorado to smoke
the mountains high and higher clouds
unreachable
(originally published in Setu, Summer 2020)
parking garage stone and yellow emergency
the microphone’s metal web against my lips
to vomit last year in haphazard dollops
of song, wolf, and waterfall dry music
career in loneliness this lifetime achievement
many-tailed and thick porous semiconscious
rambling strummed brown fingernails clacking
away at my hard reverberation of longing the car
window closed to keep the sound in
(originally published in The City Key, Spring 2020)
I reach out– longing for connection.
When surrounded by seagulls, I look
for the first semblance of friend. Not
that we have much to anchor anymore,
conversationally. Dolzani’s English class.
I didn’t read assigned books. Didn’t
become The Old Man and The Sea. So
many years to make safe passage. My voice
was a heavy, closed hardcover, whispering
through class as pages turned, and here
I am, strange and estranged, gazing out
over the Pacific, waiting for your response
on my seashell phone. Any sign of humanity
meant I would try. You never answer, anyway.
I unmoor my flaming boat to the coming
monsoon, scrape my hand against burning
plank to gather first ashes. I write my name in
soot. I hold my breath and swoosh into the next
life: the hold-on-to-me, the help-me, the drive-
aimlessly-through-your-twenties until arriving,
at last, at another confused island, a new
decade of drifting through cloudless nights.
(originally published in Cacti Fur, Summer 2021)
We covered ourselves in soot in my mom’s basement–
you told me you loved me but I had to move home
to have your heart. We dug holes in the backyard
but already too many buried bodies so I boarded
the plane, returned to L.A. to live at the foot of hills.
I said I’d visit sometime, up top, to overlook the ocean
I knew teeming with unspeakable life–
I could not say a word of it to anyone.
(originally published in Hamline Lit Link, Spring 2020)
Finn barks at the window & I try to understand why
make noise at the sunshine we are in the clear & inside
of our heads taking dirt showers beside the Pacific
we both are allowed in this home to live our lives
on all fours and from the couch watch the world
go slowly by
(originally published in Agony Opera, Summer 2021)
you invite me into a
hundred hungry dreamers
you / dis
mantling / dis
gusting
predator
of the light
(originally published in Goat’s Milk Magazine, Spring 2020)
I wanted to be a wayward lasso,
to toss and be tossed.
Racetrack for the rainy season.
Horsetail-whipped.
Grieve not the slobbering mouth
of distance. I wanted a different
chance. Someone else,
or no one– there, entwined,
I’m sorry. You said there
was a way to make long
distance work and I was
no one in return but another.
Already, then, I was
galloping to the dark place
of convincing the pavement’s
otherwise steadiness. Did not
wish an earthquake to settle
my legs with falling,
so eager was I
to forget the other path.
(originally published in The Wax Paper, Spring 2020)
The wave at the shore
was followed by blood
and flame. California singes
itself, Thousand Oaks
surrounded by smoke
clouds rising
into a blanket, smothering,
like the chorus
assembling on our streets–
the world is dying,
but first our friends
and neighbors,
how this bloodshed
has been on the fringe
of our existence until
it’s not, it’s everywhere–
down the road, polluting
our hope, it seemed
everyone
we knew cast a vote
to turn the world
blue
so how do we
drown the flames?
(originally published in Capsule Stories, Fall 2020)
Today, I slide on slush on my drive. Unplowed roads, slippery odometer–
morning snow surprise. Pittsburgh’s a city of hills unavoidable, and later,
waiting on a grocery pickup, I stare into the rearview mirror at the frost-
tipped pines when a knock on my window removes me from my existential
stupor. I don’t know how to interact anymore. Crank the window the wrong
way. Peppermint mocha, the years past. I bought a latte this morning but did
not know how to order it. The Dunkin teens stared, dumfounded, and it was
a foggy day like this– in which I float through the happenings– that I last
crashed my car. In Los Angeles, I flew down the dry 405, beat after
a long day in a Hollywood studio, and was amazed at the hospital light
brightness as I passed Westwood, like I could snap my fingers and time
would once again resume, while five other lanes of traffic zigged around
me with no regard to my existence. I was like a visitor to myself dragged
back into being with silent smoke pouring out the mouth of my Ford’s
hood. The front was crumpled but the SUV I slammed into appeared
untouched. The sixteen-year-old girl called her dad to ask what to do.
She took my insurance, my number, then drove off with the rest of the
world, as I stood at the side of the highway waiting for someone to
help me go home, still, to this day.
(originally published in the chapbook Count Seeds With Me (Ethel Zine & Micro-Press), Spring 2022)