Our pilot,
Akin to a stressed soccer mom,
Drives fast; tries to out runs the storm
He’s mumbling over the intercom softly.
The cabin walls quiver like a tired lung holding a breath.

We’re just kids,
in the back of the car,
It’s better to sleep like you’re dreaming.
A girl cradles her child’s skull in the
crooked arm that holds her glowing phone.
Their skin breathes through each other
still one body at this stage.

All the men in the room have bowed heads
like nonchalant prayers; their faces in state fake rest.
It feels like our collective mom is pressing the breaks.

The baby’s mouth lies agape with a tear of drool;
its dance descends down like windowpane rain.
There has never been anything to hold onto in this life.

The rain, wet hair moving,
across the airplane’s tired eyes–
We are but tiny babies huddle on the back
of a drowning spider in this storm,
Humbled and choiceless.

Very hard labor.
Two years in all the worst jails,
hours on a treadmill,
a plank bed with no mattress. 
Then they took away his books. 

That time Wooten and I tried to walk
the forty miles from Lexington to Danville at 2 AM,
our determination fueled by Jim Beam
and the myth of what was in
Helen Berry’s underpants:

As we walked we talked of starting
our own traveling circus,
with a bearded lady and fat man,
perhaps one or two of the Blue Fugates,
touring the small towns of Kentucky
where the rubes are easily separated
from their money, swinging down around
Lake Cumberland and back up to the outskirts of Louisville
where the people are so stubborn
they’ll hold a thing to be true
even when you show them
the beard’s charcoal pencil and the fat’s all tumor.

At four and sobering up
I was walking the center line
when out of nowhere, a car,
sailing over the rise.

I was spun like a cartoon rabbit
as the auto went past,
and found myself in the middle
of the oncoming lane somehow still in one piece.

Wooten started screaming Whoo-boy,
swearing I’d passed through
the middle of the car.
You should be dead, he hooted,
over and over, like a mantra,
or a curse.

We both watched the car
that should have killed me
hurl away from us
into the first weak spokes of dawn,
its brake lights never once
flashing red.
I pinched myself, hard,
and it hurt.

Wooten and I don’t talk much anymore,
our lives veered down different paths.
He has his worries, and I have mine.
Worries, but no troubles:

ever since that night on the back roads
of my stupid youth, every day’s been gravy.

earth 
so dry 
horseshoes
barely 
crescent 
dirt. heavy 
creak 
of western
saddles. 
tails swat 
sweat, 
miss flies. 
beth walks 
bowlegged,
carries 
a machete,

watches
a brown 
ribbon
weaving
grizzled 
grass stubs 
lift its 
length 
toward 
her blue-
jeaned calf. 
shing!
a snake
sliced
clean in
two.

“In a small shed at the top of a 100-foot-tall steel tower deep in the New Mexico desert, Donald Hornig sat next to the world’s  first atomic bomb in the late evening of July 15, 1945, reading a book of humorous essays.”
                                                                                                                                  Paul Hornig’s obituary
                                                                                                                                  New York Times, Jan. 26, 2012 
 
In Alamogordo, they say, the sun came up twice that day. Like a God
who threatens glory and punishment it was the most beautiful show
I’d ever seen. The hot start of a star, then a white bloom.

The sand broke into tiny blades of green radioactive glass. Some believed
the monster spark would ignite the stratosphere, but the promise
was so much stronger than our fear.

The explosion was like a birth. Catalysm at the click of a button.
In lightning, I baby-sat the plutonium. I read aloud while the bomb waited.
I put down my book and connected the switches.

for anarchic bliss
candidate does not exist-
count the ‘missing’ votes

Do you remember when we were young?
We spent hours talking through the nights.
We watched as they turned into new days,
under the midnight sun,
wondering if we would ever make it to 30.   

I did.  
You didn’t.  

We were only kids,
and still we found ourselves so troubled.
So…lost.  

Last year i made it to 30,
and today I can’t congratulate you.
Cause you never got the chance,
to grow older.  

At night we would talk about,
life,
death,
and how we sometimes felt like leaving it all behind.
Simply because life at times,
felt like a battleground.  

I feel enraged when people complain,
about turning 30,
cause you never had the option.
Someone else decided for you,
that this was it.  

He stole your time,
and we made sure we would all remember,
every minute of your 17 years on this planet.  

I still feel you every time,
in the winds that cools me down.
I see you in every wave at the shore.
I hear you in every song you played for me,
and I listen to you whisper at me,
every time I feel like giving up.  

I miss those teddy bear hugs you would give us,
at every hello, and at every goodbye.  

I live for the both of us now,
and today,
I will celebrate every minute,
every memory we ever shared.  

Thank you for teaching me to be grateful,
that I get to grow old. 

between if and is
do we know the different  is it invention  is it practicality
she pretends time is not howling outside her window
staring as she does at this sliver of sky  calling it daytime
she seems unable to reconcile the chasm between confusion and some obscure vision of truth  aren’t they the same
she has a memory of a bicycle and two friends
she spends the day with them preparing to go yet never leaving out
time stuck in the mind
all feelings turned into facts
she will walk by July
she lies deeper in the bed of her own making

Sparks of light
Each a childs wish
Whispered into the dark

would be easy, you’d think: there’d be
a _______________of nuns (choir, convent, coven,
clerestory, clique, cloister?).  but only three or four
glide past me.  more tourist-clergy all in black in Roman swelter
no monks or friars save me in mufti in the shade
over this hour of waiting.  more African vendors
festooned with bracelets and bangles, some scarves,
some odd multicolored phone gadgets, vuoi comprarlo?
and the old man in a T-shirt guarding bags of trash,
every few minutes sweeping a wrapper and retreating
to Roman shade.  the snakes of badged tourists stream
in undulating waves ears tuned to the guide in front.
now a choir young singers clutching scores dressed
in black suits, black skirts, off to some vatican do.
and waiting.                     
                         until i realize the title of my next poem:                     
                         “stood up by a nun in rome.”