Fortune: lines lead somewhere
hopeful, but a jumbled mess.
Our palms wrinkle quickly.
We’re at a loss to say.
The American Interstate
is visible from space.
City lights a horde
of blinking phones.
Severed cables hang
over every intersection.
Tires, wires, water bottles
amassed hill-high.
A crow watches from the top,
her head in and out of smog.
(originally published in Evening Street Review, Summer 2022)
everywhere around the world.
I learn this at work, a television
production office. A film would
frack lands surrounding its sets
were it to save a few hundred
bucks– you thought I’d say lives?
What powers that be? We’re alive,
yes, already pulsing red rivers
breached with microplastics.
The jingling adds up in my veins.
When I read forever chemicals,
I want it to mean love
but it is in the way we will
suffer together, forever,
oil rigs raised, still, all
over, hands up in ugly prayer.
The burning questions I want
to ask I can’t even stand
outside in a storm and be satiated.
(originally published in A Thin Slice of Anxiety, Winter 2023)
the meteor
from within
the confines of
your neighborhood
charred remnants
your ghosts live
here
in the ashes
the smoky streets
a gasp of oxygen
thickening
(originally published in Fleas on the Dog, Summer 2020)
So you made a carrot soufflé–
no one cares about the mush
orange and earthy you made
in the oven. That shit is under
control. Look instead at Joshua
trees burning down the desert
runway. That’s a catwalk. A
catcall to the Earth from
your rolled-down pickup
truck window. See
how hot they are? It’s
like those cruel videos
where the cat’s caretaker
places a cucumber
behind the off-guard animal,
and people laugh
as the creature flees in
surprise terror.
These videos were big
for a summer. This
slideshow of tiny
cruelties– it’s harder
to find new spaces
to hide.
(originally published in G*MOB, Spring 2022)
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)
the cicadas are out
early don’t be
alarmed by the
coming swarms build a memory
of winter build
a memory of here
I loved what we had
cold glove
in warm hand
but now when growing old I know
I didn’t do enough to do my part
the wandering joyrides burning ghosts of
dinosaurs from gunky lungs of millennium
sedans cigarettes in our mouths tv the endless
bedlamps they say sleep is best in total
darkness o how I wasted more than I knew
on those daily long commutes
(originally published in Orange Quarterly, Winter 2019)
The whole year has been hurricane season
in this nation of bayous haunted by ghosts
of cowboys shooting bullets into the clouds,
gunsmoke in the air, then a disaster of rain.
Save us, God, from these dark clouds looming–
there are too many more bodies to save.
(originally published in The Los Angeles Review of Los Angeles, Summer 2019)
Ancient gods rain fire into
winter’s mythological mitt.
Inhabitants escape from the
tampered breaches to become
apprentices of harmony and
tell of wondrous kings–
the bestiary a cephalopod
might preach. Tell me
less of spirit, more of
body. Tell me hunger.
Tell me deserts, dry
open mouths.
(originally published in Amethyst, Winter 2018)