5 titles
I’m sorry
I was God
I love you good
And for once it felt like a real fall.
The flourish of spiders in my house during summer.
The first time I drove through the Pass to Pullman, Washington,
the wheat had been harvested and left
just dirt and dirt.
Good
Glass
Glass
L is my favorite letter
as Glass is my favorite word
there is a strange
way that enclosed
water smells some-
thing sickening
We stopped at a KFC, Burger King combo
at mile 75. A woman cradling
a 12 pack said to me,
Babysitting.
Growing up in the Mojave taught me
that precipitation always has a fast sound.
To see this silent fall for the first time is like
if there isn’t someone who can forgive me
I am
Sorry, I was
God
I love you
Goodnight
B FLAT (A PARTING)
Winner of the Red Noise Collective Poetry Prize & Nominated for The Pushcart Prize
Some days, I have a red cape
and an ear for daisies.
I have glitter polish and one long nail.
He dances and I laugh.
Then--
Do you hear the low call?
A fog horn bleats
the bodies in the street after curfew.
The 2AM cold spring call, a B flat tonight.
But the rain evens her out, and he
can’t resist.
Monthly blood rags drip
from the shower rod now
that I live alone.
An old mattress hipshot
against the wall with tan
human-colored ovals and a loose
belly where the man lay.
All the stuffing beaten out.
Isn’t it everywhere you can see the foot catching an edge?
The shove came way before that.
And the scramble, one final plea
juice-sweet on concrete cooked sick in the warming sun.
Where to go from here but head-first down the stairs?
Goldhood
I still eat string cheese
and sit on the kitchen counter.
Toe the acorns on our driveway from the oak,
smell the rain-stained concrete and
bright green, baby grass,
regrown after the fires.
The secrets I kept as a kid –
climbing Coyote Hill at night,
playing alone by the willow and the gutter,
burying the metal charm near Fifi’s place.
They’ve become spaces in me.
Snow globe worlds, contained but always shaken,
showering everything
with a dewy hue.
The slow settling of fantasies.
It was magic to me.
The uglier side of self-love is
the creeping disappointment that comes on
like a head cold –
that no one will ever do it
quite like me.
That even the story I tell
of my engagement is
better than the thing itself.
Everything born here is gold.
Everything but the hissing yellow street lamps,
the empty cul-de-sac,
the stream of cigarette smoke,
those four murders.
Everything else.