THE WORLD A-MELTING
Ice caps melting
lightening their weight
Tremors swarm
Poetry
316 works
NIGHT NOISES
A heavy truck
Zinging motorcycle
A car horn
A DREAM
The itinerant sellers
of art posters
once more came
GODS ARE WOMEN
Fucking sin penetrated me Tonight.
For once.
The way you wish for harder and
DADDY ISSUES
Destined child, her future’s bright as the golden walls of Olympus
That is before being born a daughter of a man whose dad mistaken love for violence
The father’s missteps was her grandfather’s wretched care
Discourse On Love
“...It is, for when the spontaneity
has been removed by either man or woman,
the other shall receive this sudden backstep
sofreh-ye aghd
for Niloofar and Philip
the mirrored morning
pushes out
6.10 a.m.
the floorboards don’t creak
twenty press-ups on the rug
sometimes
How to Pray
I can’t trim gristle
off fatty meat
and pray at the same time,
The Times Are (after Sylvia)
floss for missing teeth.
Poison on the nipples.
A letter in a shed on fire.
Jocks, Freaks, and Nerds (The Ford, Massachusetts, 1970s)
The jocks played
high school helmet-ball.
They dubbed the others
The World is So Small
I can smell a child’s fear
several continents away.
It is burnt toast bird guano chocolate chip cookies.
Instructions for Teaching Rain to Read Radiology Films
No one remembers who noticed first:
the rain pausing above hospitals,
waiting.
The Cartographer of Vanishing Organs
The anatomy atlas was never wrong.
It was only early.
Each night, after the hospital emptied
Arrangements
You bravos had better be ready to fight.—Warren Zevon, My Ride’s Here
I’m thinking bagpipes. No, not bagpipes.Too much hassle and too damn much money.Save that for something that
They know my favorites.And if they beat me out the door, a playlist.Mostly Tom Waits. The gritty
AGAINST ERASURE
Louie gunned down in his shop,
Boris struck and flung to asphalt by the drunk driver,
and now,
Erleichda
Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.
—Albert Einstein
It’s time, child, to talk about the feathers —
Per Stirpes
I stand as one, but I come with ten thousand.
~Maya Angelou
And now comes you, child,
Change of Seasons
Summer south of the border
iguanas pose nude
adobe-lined cities
A Language Searching for a Home
My mother tongue, my birth language,
is far from dead, yet everyone
reassures me it’s dying.