I keep my house key in my back pocket
I don’t need it anymore
Mom and dad got a padlock a year ago
I keep my cuticles on my tongue
I worry them until they bleed
It’s become a pattern
I keep my memory on a thumb-drive
I don’t know it like I used to
I forget what you did to me
But I still don’t crawl back
The rumbling of my engine worries me
But I don’t call
I broke a promise I made to myself
And that’s something you will never encourage from me again
A few hours after hatching
North America’s only perching duck,
Takes a Fluff-filled death defying
dive from the nest
to the hard forest floor below
The height from which they leap
is astonishing, 30, 50 ft
Their wings are but nubs
And they bounce on the ground
After ricocheting off branches or plant life
to join their mother below
Sometimes I feel a kinship
with those ducklings
As each fluffy feeling of mine plummets
into the public sphere of LexPoMo.
It doesn’t hesitate too long,
doesn’t consider whether it’s truly ready
Or equipped to deal with what hard blows
may result
Sometimes a mere hour after birth
The wood duckling discovers flight
before it’s grown wings
The First Fracture
i held it because someone had to—
she called me her favorite.
her sorrow arrived like a storm,
and i became the bowl she poured herself into.
young, i learned to steady a voice that wasn’t mine.
i believed it meant i was the one
who had to keep her whole.
i remember the year she shattered—
how the house tilted toward her grief,
how i moved through the rooms
collecting what she dropped—
confessions,
the small, bright pieces of a life
she couldn’t hold together.
i didn’t know then that i was learning a skill.
her breaking taught me the language—
the way a voice splits midsentence,
the way a house rearranges itself
around a wound.
i was young, parsing the fault lines,
learning damage’s fluency—
how every story has a seam
you feel before you see.
she spilled herself into me—
her fear, her wanting, her wild,
calling me the only one who understood.
i was young, too young to be the place
where someone else lived,
but she made a room inside me
and i kept it lit, believing that was love.
Placed on the lower right corner of vehicle’s window
In front of me in drive thru at Jimmy-John’s
Vehicle is all black, a VW SUV, tinted windows
Placard is bright white, big contrast to vehicle
Grabbed my attention, my thoughts
Wish it wasn’t necessary to be said
Wish we lived without its call
Wish we lived in harmony, ALL.
storm sewer stretches round & ribbed
underground, light caught in a smaller
ring down the length of this larger
one in which i fit, crouched, i
creep forward, echos of amphibians’
voices welcoming me into their own
temporary reprieve, algae
moist hollow, August heat overwhelming
pedestrians on the sidewalks but we
below whisper cool reassurances
that summer will not enter here to force
either one of us to have to choose a side
If you don’t
find God on a freeway
in Los Angeles, you’ve
never had a spiritual experience.
Remote qualification took place in
a multilevel “tri-sexual” club,
where anything goes,
with a nice, nasty
dance floor for
vehement grinding
to pounding, loud industrial music.
Mommy and Daddy’s music.
Then, life in my 30’s, coming
into Los Angeles, with a Jeep was
beach air and
highway shimmer,
Church’s Chicken and taquerias,
cholos and señoritas eating
my wife’s white chili out the back,
with the biggest jalapeños
her buck could afford, pumping bass
popping screws, and
Arlo Guthrie mixes with Snoop
and Ice Cube.
God gave her to me
and God took her away, although
she said the Source would take me
first, and nothing,
nothing but this, nothing
but that I’m still most alive on
asphalt spaghetti
where breezes blow
from the West,
where ocean will boil,
the sun takes a skinny dip
and each nipple fizzles.
Let me give the world a gift. More incorruptible than love.”
A perfectly cracked egg for an omelet
Is of no consequence in the hands of the baker.
But a perfect crack when boiled hard
Is dependent upon the maker
