7/279

Listening comes in a paper bird.

He floats down like manna to nest
in weary hands, facing their Weaver
agape, their question mark
confessions rising like smoke.

Gnawing the bit, my young full
of friction fingers look at him
like coal. Like gift wrapped vinegar
upon the floor of a thirsty mouth.

Sometimes I think in landfills,
packrat disdain for each bird
too delicate to bear my burdens,
and from a hollowed trailer,

shake my fist at their silence.
But a cupped palm incarnates
the cloud overhead and slow
unison moves toward the coast.
when I stop to look,

thousands, dressed in scraps,
as though with purple royalty
robe, push upward
into an able sky.

Only for exhale do I manage
thank you, and pray you be miles
west by the time I set fire,
messengers
from a purer pasture.

6/279 playground

"we're going to chain you up."

the most adorable
hill of five years I
know today wafts
her face of sunflowers
my way. and yet
even with all the warmth
in her teeth, she speaks
methods of my undoing.
I laugh, but wish she
would feed these words the
beauty of her namesake.

5/279 vivace

Caffe nico
machiatto with a mask on.
Cinnamon snowflakes
sift espresso song
My candid pinky,
quarter size cup wink
Three sixty canyon
close to zero coffee drink
Orange peel on my plate
Can’t quite decipher
Cut from the rind
like a twenty to lifer
Coffee fantastic
fruit takes the fruit cake
Fallin’ from twiggy hands
Hot on my mind state
Stomach swap eyes
states his preference
orange in the tube
question: what’s intelligent?
gimme that orange
free of preservatives
wanna eat it right now
tell you what its purpose is

4/279

I remember when the dinosaurs appeared,

watched their bones scuttle into the leather and muscle.
Oh, how the rocks danced at their steps!

The brontosaurus tongue peeked out
to coddle saunas trapped in the air.

A mosquito inquired his rivers beneath into
volcanoes spouting out the tongue's eyes.

I remember how tyrannosaur's teeth flared
into knives at their first flirt with blood,

how to this day tyrants trace their lineage
to a survival worship mouth of cutlery,

even after the waves had pounced her into glass.

3/279

This bull did not choose
the rope in my hand,
this road to record its journey.

Also not chosen,
the noose woven of murdered hair and
desecrated bed cloth. This adornment.

This herd did not choose
its smoke grave. Yet here,
gathered they taste the blade.

We rode to this tent on their backs,
keeping our heads above the flood's still hands.
It is in the waiting that we drown.

Hush and murmur scuttle across the hive.
Words of some devout caught a glimpse
through the curtains who mark holiness.

The high priest on Isaac's borrowed bed,
blood exposed and boiling on his skin,
His last breaths fanning the flames.

I strain my ears to see closer, blinded by
growing cacophony of entitlement, leaving,
future plans of pilgrims obstinate for atonement.

2/279 old house.

(This poem was inspired by an untitled poem out of Pablo Neruda's book, The Sea and the Bells.)


Let it be said that these walls collapsed from fatigue,
that the crossbeams shook violently before unhinging.

This is not a suicide note.

Let the shingles burst
for all the sun in their veins
and the floorboards obituary report only two words:
One: Dancing. The other: starshine.
Let the ceiling be stitched of helicopters, and when
the walls cave in let them carry me away.
Let the district appraisal read Not Fit For Renovation. Let
them bulldoze a bonfire. Let the homeless gather to warm
their hands, and next to them, children clasping marshmallow tipped
sticks and next to them a GIANT graham cracker.
Let it be a graham cracker billboard
and let it crash like a window on the road
when no one is there. Let the police and ambulances come
and when the Seahawks game ends let the people leave their cars
to hurdle the barricade and hold the wreckage
like pieces of the Berlin Wall. Let them take it to the children
and see truly maybe for the first time people who don't
have an address and carry them
from the police's now obligated eyes.
This is a suicide note.

Not like a blindfold
like I have lived on this street for 23 years,
I have seen the bulldozers,
followed their tracks
to a church of black ghosts gathered to remember a shelter
who left prom in a hummer and melted it on an Iraqi mine field.
They do not speak fence.
They do not consider the market value.
This note says
I've been thinking about how the Taj Mahal is a tomb, how
you can tell cities apart by their skylines;
instead of having this taken from me I'd rather
give it away.
Rent costs us our days, and talk is cheap, but maybe
we'd have more space to breathe if we took the doors off,
and yeah, this could just be hot air, and these are just dreams,
but dreamings what I do when my eyes fall silent,
when I can't see my boundaries,
the fortress,
and in these dreams I shelf the newspaper, imagine
concrete as teachable liquid,
tell moat water to freeze,
pull constellations into chandeliers, but
even with the lights on, I hope that when I return,
I return to myself
as if to an old house.

1/279: It Begins!

I've decided to continue this poem-a-day business to the best of my ability and write every day for the next 17 squared days! Here's the first. I actually should have posted it yesterday. Off to a rough start...

b&n

1.
Hallway apology guards the mens room.
She pulls backward as the sterile door closes,
wheelbarrow of child in her grasp.
From under a dust tornado chaos
a bowl of crescent moon teeth slips,

I'm sorry, it says Baby Changing Station.

onto the floor
as if to say

my husband,
such a table
he never used.

2.
Storytime.
That boy
has a furry pink leash around his tummy,
makes swimming motions across the hardwood floor,
a mop for impatient puddles
leaking like oil from his mother's good intentions.

3.
Five women each carry 20 oz of latte.
I forget the Canada branded question and remark,
that's a latte of steamed milk.

I recall,
only humans
drink milk after infancy,
and watch her elbow bend into a shelf
of photographs from a time when
everything she needed
was provided by her mother.