Scientists have found new but tentative
                                                                                             evidence that a faraway world orbiting
                                                                                             another star may be home to life. 
                                                                                                                               – BBC news report

Warm interstellar oceans
cover the sub-Neptune
crust, cradling microbes,
rocking their watery crib.

Our rumored cousins are
eons away as our machine
stops, so Forster wrote;
even that won’t prevent the

coming of more microbes,
the higher power allowing
something new to do what
we older ones could not.

Though we left the gallows
of Nuremberg years ago
in books and nooks of
archives and classrooms,

we are Munch’s nameless
man screaming from his
bridge. We are Sumy and
Bucha, where blue and gold

flags dip low. We are men
in boxers made to bow
before the death of
due process. Democracy

was a fantasy, now truth
is born from the loudest
mic, and you too will
soon be rendered moot.

Such is the DNA of microbes
in warm oceans; mutations
lurking in the murky mud, our
last universal chance is found.

Saturday night at the kitchen table
We rolled the Yatzee dice to the tunes of Wheel of Fortune and Hee-Haw.
Vannah and Minnie Pearl’s “HOW-DEEEE!”, ageless even after a long week.
Conversations of cows and corn, beans ready to pick and can. 
Tomorrow would come early, and I had no idea then how quickly yesterday would be gone.
But that night, the smell of tobacco, sunshine and soap-clean rolled me into bed when the TV went quiet.

(A poem after Dejan Stojanovic)

A poet once said, 
“There is another alphabet, whispering from every leaf, singing from every river, shimmering from every sky.” And I believe him. 

For the leaf teaches me how to spell its green name
with fine-veined ink in patterns like letters
formed by the hand of a small child learning 
to read a book whose pages bud, bloom, flower, fall.   

The river dares me to whistle and scream and laugh and drink
deep, hungry gulps until I can hold no more and no less
than the pulsing heart of all that is drawn back to the sea,
spilling past the edge of the horizon to fill what needs to be filled.  

 The sky shows me love can hold its wobbling orbits
even in the icy dark, even in collapse
galaxies burn bright enough to send kisses of light across eons
to reunite stardust with stardust

And I learn to sound out their language
in the ancient phonetics of awe,
of wonder   

-until I shimmer     
as they shimmer-                       

-until I shimmer as they shimmer-                               
leaf, river, sky                          
     leaf, river, sky                                 
          leaf, river, sky

Rain beats steadily from grey skies.
Hundreds of soggy catalpa blossoms fall.
Outside my window, the magnolia births
bud after bud.      Inside, ripe                    
nectarines make love in every room.

The flat of a mirror is beveled,
where I slid off the edge,
light bending backwards
and forcing choices, my head turned
to look for the three
    –  you and me and she.

I was a bevel of light from the looking glass. 
I was Alice floating like cotton candy
and laced with cinnamon hearts. 
I held tight while 
she and thee stuck your tongues out,
catching strands of pastel sugar
spun in funhouse booths.
She and we were sweet in youth
before touching the edge
of every last word she said.

Here you come again, LexPoMo,
calling my non-poet voice
to reach deep down and fake it. 

Here you come again
and I hear Dolly’s sweet trill 
turn into a cheerful ear worm
made more cheerful still by reminding me
of my friend Marianne, an actual poet, 
who saw Dolly before she was famous
and has video to prove it. 

I love that story.

So here I go. 

i always thought that when
the revolution came
i would be among
the ones
dancing 

i thought i would be fearless
arms wide open spinning
and spinning jumping 
screaming just like
the last time

and the time before that
and that other time- especially
that time i thought i actually knew
something- actually understood
something 

knew that it wasn’t just me and
that we’d all been fed lies and
that there were cannibals among us  

i once believed i could see them and that
perhaps- i could love them
before they killed us all-  you know like
love them out of their hate

now wouldn’t that have been
a great reason to dance?

You need gills to breathe in air like this.
June One and already there is too much
moisture pooling on necks and upper lips,
transforming hair into static clouds.
Already mosquito sting on ankle, raised
welts on tender flesh. Already the world around me
feels too close. Also, already,
lighting bugs, those impossible bright blimps.
Already peony and daylily, lavender
and hydrangea. Already bullfrog
and the white-tailed deer. Already my best friend’s
three year old, who never wants our walk to end,
small hand hot and sticky in mine.
I will gladly grow gills, if that’s what it takes.
I will evolve, rainbow scales replacing skin,
transparent eyelidsthat shnick into place
as I wade through the dampness.
I will amphibian. Crustacean.
I will do what it takes to love
every bit of this hot green world.

There were rules for everything.

Hemlines.
Tongues.
Eyes.
Hands.

The body itself felt like a thing to apologize for.
At fourteen, she learned to cross her legs
before she learned that desire had a name.
Learned that holiness meant shrinking—voice lowered,
skirts lengthened,
hunger hidden beneath polite smiles
and folded church bulletins.
The women called it virtue.
But no one warned her
that womanhood arrives like a lit match.

Quiet at first.

Then suddenly,
everything was capable of burning.
She felt it in fragments—
the heat in her stomach
when a boy she should not want
rested his hand against the small of her back,
the dangerous flutter beneath her ribs
when someone looked at her
like she was more than a soul to be managed.

She prayed after every wanting.
Head bowed.
Knees bruised against carpet.
But heaven remained terribly silent
about the fact that
Eve was made from living flesh,
not marble.

That bodies are not sins- they are instruments.

Still,
shame followed her like scripture memorized too young.
She carried it into marriage.
Into motherhood-
into the exhaustion
of becoming necessary to everyone.

She learned how to nurse a child
while starving herself.
How to make dinner,
fold laundry,
smile in photographs,
and silence the part of her
that still ached to be touched
like something sacred instead of useful.

No one speaks about the loneliness of women
raised to believe their longing makes them dangerous.
Or how many mothers stand at sinks
with holy water hands
and wildfire hearts.
She spent years believing
good women did not ache.
Did not fantasize.
Did not grieve the lives
they almost chose.

But the truth arrived slowly—through poetry,
through heartbreak,
through betrayal,
through healing,
through the unbearable relief
of being seen fully
by another human being
and not struck dead for it.

Desire, she realized,
was never the opposite of holiness.
Perhaps it was proof of it.
What is more divinethan a body capable of love?
What is more human
than wanting closeness?
What is prayer,
if not a yearning directed upward?
And maybe that is why
the saints always looked aflame in paintings.
Maybe devotion
has always resembled fire.
Maybe every woman
who has ever stood trembling
between purity and hunger was never broken.
Only burning.

Because holy things burn too.