Category: Poetry

I have a stack of unfinished poems in my drawer – many there for years, decades – some missing just a word, one perfect word. Nodding undergraduate heads.

I loved the alley bar noise in the Mission district. Sunday mornings our downstairs neighbor played gospel so loud all three roommates left the house. On my mirrored closet I wrote a two-line poem in eyeliner by Alicia Portnoy translated from the Spanish: I am talking to you about poetry / and you say / when do we eat. / The worst of it is / I’m hungry too.

I want to wash this skull with Lysol

And write how much each wet lobe weighs—

The gulf is in the sky. Switching direction suddenly clouds pour from the north, breaking our clock.

Still I feel I am one now with dispossessed my imaginary sees encamped in the Arizona desert (along with Cochise, perhaps, and his Chiricahua over that rise there, with John Brown And Nat Turner, plotting some bloody revenge), but my peace is separate—I have O2 at night.

the night before I read about someone else with a slit in her back, feathers dispensing flying through the air the only indication tainted maroon of the encounter,