Everything is the same on the way to school, the beard guy with his cardboard sign, the white-orange cat that’s weeks-long dead getting pressed deeper and deeper into the pavement from our tires, and Bailey’s stupid big-wheeled truck with its tattered flag sticking up out of the bed, the I’m a patriot stickers of guns plastered on his bumper. But your empty desk …
December is mango season, when sayaca tanagers peck holes and holes and holes. They flock to trees with northern exposure and gorge on the earliest ripened fruits, which hang motionless like sunkissed teardrops not quite sad enough to fall. One by one, however, eventually they drop—their fleshy, yellow …
as always, my life has become the blade-tip of a spade held by morning just before the coagulation of light as always, there is no princedom in loneliness, a liminal space, the beginning of a godless season twilight’s spokes spin away the sky & like a martyr the moon is forced to burn over this garden on the edge of town I do as I have done every humid evening and hang pulled weeds on the fence I murder the simple thorns but not before they claw their names across the lines in my …
Last April, we had a winged visitor on our deck. The hummingbird’s trips to the sugar water had become more frequent. Peeking out from behind the patio’s glass doors, my husband and I followed her flight from the feeder. She landed right before our eyes, in an upturned fork of the overhanging bougainvillea. Her cup-shaped nest was made of thin twigs and speckled with bits of pale green. Inside, two eggs like alabaster were shaded by the …
Those embalmed and those with one leg Those who go away to work every morning The ones who have children with other women Men who write their dreams down Tailors, male and female alike Those with over-large ears Heroes except for Homeric Some who flew Women who smell like wet leather Adolescents, male and female alike The ones who have never been photographed Men who refuse to ride horses Sailors …
Last year I visited the city in which we became friends, and I tried to find that pie place. It must have closed at some point. I never knew its name or address, only that it was west of the expressway. I got off at every exit, muttering to myself that it had to be somewhere, even it was east of the sun and west of the moon. I wanted to find it and order four slices of pie and eat them with two forks—a bite for you, and a bite for me, …