Countdown

Vodka I would glug from a wound
on my forearm, health preached and instructed.

I said I saw a liver pumping liquid from the sky
but the crowd called it cirrus. I could not differentiate

lust from love, not in the waning daylight,
not when I am trying to make it

the rest of the year wanting to forget
its starting incident (the backyard pond

shimmering in the moonlight amidst televisions
of confetti). The public countdown ends

at zero but I keep counting, never an end in sight,
always with my eye on the next

golden apple to descend into a crowd.

(originally published in BOMBFIRE, Spring 2021)

Cloud

the raindrop
life (transience

is a home)
loneliness

forms
on clear days

rising out
of reach

& always
when you wake

(originally published in Literary Yard, Summer 2018)

A river isn’t really blue. The Mississippi
has dried, and even love is transparent.

We adorn ourselves blue so loss
can be quantified in color. Such

is the brittle paintbrush, naked
and grieving, but we are not

the color of grieving,
nor tobacco spat in the dugout

in shame. We remember
the dirt, and who we loved,

long before we searched
clouds’ faces for ghosts,

her grays in the white
within eternal blue.

(originally published in ‘the vacant hinge of a song’, courtesy of Origami Poems Project)

I listened, during that foggy morning stroll
on the Golden Gate, when you alluded
to what it must mean to jump,
how it must feel to fall.

The foghorn blared every five minutes
from some ship we could not find beneath us.
We peered our heads over the low railing
and inhaled the gray.

Red telephones rang in our heads.
I can still hear the ringing
from the hotel’s broken phone–
thin wires dangled into lines

on our palms, curved and infinite–
an atlas to guide the whispers
we cupped into our hands
at night.

I feared faraway screams
or the deafening sound of cymbals, shards
of metal launched from the hinges
of what was thought secure–

I did not expect
in an instant, without percussion–
I did not expect the fog, how sterile
it seems, like the afterlife, how it turns

the familiar into silhouettes–
to make this any easier.

(originally published in riverbabble, Issue #28, Winter 2016)

You wanted to eat my face
just as seven A.M. south Oregon fog
conceals trees over a low valley.
I wanted the same of yours.

What you liked was the sky descended:
how you’re able to grip, fleetingly,
the mortal, shifting clouds–
to think, I have touched the untouchable.

Many pines, from a distance, can be held
by two fingers. We can choose to let them dangle
or hold
steady, steady…

The fog consumes and rises
while we watch the sun burn slowly west.

When the rain begins,
the soft pattering against the windshield
mimics the sound of your jaw
fake-chomping my cheeks–
nearly-inaudible clicks.

The speedometer oscillates
between sixty-five and ninety.

The hillsides change so suddenly
with every mile– shifting smiles hidden
by a fog you know will also fade.

(originally published in VAYAVYA)

*Nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Writing Knights Press in 2017