The crickets chirp when you sniff the cat–
that’s our bedtime routine.
Google asks us to set an alarm:
never.
(originally published in Winamop, Winter 2023)
pandemic
Video Games on New Year’s Day
grape stem the fruit centipede
parched time
a skin between my teeth
fingernails tapping on blue porcelain bowl
then the controller my hand’s touched everything in this place
thanks for your spider fingers on the soft of my chest
lips purple with last night’s wine
new year burst with pessimism not
optimism beginnings are overrated
I do best when I don’t know where I’m going
(originally published in A Thin Slice of Anxiety, Winter 2023)
Complicity
I don’t know how to help.
I have been in my house,
mouth shut, for months
and months and
when I speak, it is the wrong
thing, so I apologize
for everything. Mostly I am sorry
I didn’t burn the station
first.
(originally published in Subterranean Blue Poetry, Fall 2020)
For Exercise and Variety
walking around my home wearing sun
glasses FitBit records silent steps on white
wood floors creak a silver SUV whirs past
window no peephole a dead end slightly
darker shade how my eyes reckon
in multiple lights their very veins
stretch and pulsate spectrum my entire
field ever present ever pressured
the world in layers I perceive body
as hunger pushing into all frames
of frames of knick-knacks I need to
donate but fear the gift-givers will find out
one may ask that yodeling pickle wasn’t
good enough of course not what was ever
its purpose but to transfer to another hand
or be buried deep in dry and dying land
(originally published in Academy of the Heart and Mind, Spring 2023)
Lost
It is depressing to walk outside.
No one of no ones, my formlessness
would be dazzling, if you knew to
look, a vapor in the shape of memory.
I know the sensation of a crowd.
Faraway fear of missing out
in my own backyard– back
to that old mindset. Life of
lives– tenth iteration? I have
planted some sense of evolution.
Everyone’s growing gardens,
hunched over greens
of potted soils, warning
the world of rabbits. I
chase the idea I’ll never
be settled anywhere. Love
to be alone but don’t know
what to do with my hands
when I am. Nor could I be
a surgeon. Or a fisherman–
imagine me, who can’t swim,
casting a net into the lake.
A splash of water and I’m
wishing for a wishing well.
(originally published in Pomona Valley Review, Summer 2022)
Low-Visibility Night Drive Home
For Tarik
highway needles appear
fast white lines I bullet
along an aimless angle
fate a roll of die half my
life I have had my license
tonight asphalt is slippery
and tenuous when I spend
too much time alone only
the hum of engine knowing
tires hiss more air the further
I go do not devalue yourself
the chanting mass says my
head loud roiling in ninety-mile
-per-hour grief I did not know
Tarik as well as those who knew
but I miss him should have
called in this ubiquitous darkness
smoke leather peeling off my
ten-year steering wheel a passing
truck sprays my windshield
mist this sharp steady rain Reek
drove a convertible he may have
been drenched but he would
have laughed made it seem okay
if I knew his misery if I could
see behind his laughter
mask the off-ramp winding
curve onto the final highway
home in his deep empathy
Reek drove this stretch of night
after switching off his lights
(originally published in Fine Lines, Fall 2021)
Commonplace Coffee on a Sunday in July, 2021
Masks encouraged. Totes hang on mustard
walls, all checkered. We’re in shorts and summer
shirts. I touch the bristle of my beard.
We’re allowed to now. To sip my rough mocha
between the gaps of my teeth under the hanging
honeybee lights, people all around me touching
their own faces.
(originally published in San Antonio Review, Winter 2023)
Rarely Drive These Days
Left at the light was the first move.
We observed traffic– cats watching
the world through a window. When
was the last time we were downtown?
All that population. And still no sign
of nature. Yes, of course, the bridges
twist into cyberpunk pretzels. I’ve
considered apocalypse but not like
this: a thousand bullets shooting
up the expressway toward a
vague conclusion.
(originally published in Viral Imaginations: COVID-19, Winter 2021)
32nd Birthday (Quarantine)
yesterday felt a few years older
but not in a wisdom way rather
the heartburn et cetera & today
we could meet somewhere in
the middle of the highway vines
creeping underneath its floor
boards with boombox boom fire
working no one I know knows
anyone recently & your faces
have faded into pixelated versions
of your best selves I have faith
in you but fuck God congregations
I do not blame ducks for soaring
off ponds at the faintest ripple but
maybe I left home a little too late
I sat in the basement drinking Carlo
Rossi reds I thought then it was now
or never
(originally published in Windows Facing Windows Review, Winter 2021)
Din
If able to shield the cat who lives
with me from loud and unexpected noises,
I will press him to my chest and carry him
over to the staircase before pushing
down the coffee grinder, cup my hands
to his ears once the vacuum starts
running (though a gentle act of palms
on his party-hat ears is already enough
to make him sprint in the opposite direction).
Kingsford has grown used to gunshots on
television, but I can do nothing for the
barrage of fireworks leading up to
America’s Independence
Day, nor conspiracy theories
which run rampant in the sky
(because what better a home
for fake facts than fireworks–
impossibly deafening bursts of light
in the night). Recently, I have been
joking that I can talk to him one-
on-one in a shared animal language,
and he looks to the wall to relay
the story of some spider who skulked
across chipped paint in the morning
hours, above where I slept,
deep in a dream louder
than any external noise–
enough to quell the sort
of revelation that makes
me believe our futures
are fucked. I wake up
refreshed enough to wait
for the day’s new din
of whatever war’s
beating on our screens
and walls and
my heavying heart.
(originally published in Subnivean, Winter 2021)