How to Play with Food / Scarcity

if
there’s
a
slice
of
tomato
stuck
to
the
wall
use
your
tongue
as
a
forklift
to
catapult
it
onto
mine

 

(originally published in Rabid Oak, Summer 2019)

Dry Lips

the stream
       parched

the heart
       lips

the lung
       lips

the light
       dark

the night
       parched

the night
       lips

the lung
      dark

the stream
      heart

the lips
      heart

the heart
      always

      parched

(originally published in Off the Coast, Fall 2017)

Flotation Tank

close your eyes,
so you forget.

or remember.
whichever submersion

buries deeper
the salt within you.

it is only you afloat,
naked in the darkest night.

your body is a dream sailing
a sea of decomposing dreams,

patches of brown grass
underneath the auburn leaves.

release what you can touch,
especially if it is nothing.

by then it should not matter
if your eyes stay closed.

when they open, find comfort
in what you cannot see.

 

(originally published in Skylark Review, Fall 2016)

Golden Gate

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)

“I Wish I Knew How to Quit You,” Says the Moon

We know it is us
who wish to quit the moon.

We close our eyes our jaggedness
could drive the sun away but never
in the way our metaphors could.

Still we write the moonlight
into the sand and growl
at the tide

and again
when the tide returns.

We cry from the shape
our lives took to intersect–

an hourglass
filled with sugar,
or a snail. Or a million

hourglasses, a million snails,
a million glimmering shells
in a measured slowness.

You were talking about the sunrise–
but I never wanted to look.

 

(originally published in Thin Air, Spring 2016)

Diamond-Shaped Boxes

because I repeatedly disregard that which is shaped like a diamond
to be a diamond,

I will flirt with the skateboard girl
who zooms away

& lament our love, lost
as yesterday’s blackened ganja.

living on the beach,
scraping sand
for a seagull’s Dorito–

we are crevices in the Santa Monica boardwalk.
we slip out from ourselves
without knowing

yet know ourselves sunken
deep in the tar ocean
& yet, somewhere, still there

from many years of being the ones
who collect what others discard,

making space in our own diamond-shaped boxes

 

(originally published in Eunoia Review, February 2016)