Making my mandolin music magically
Billowing breeze blows benignly

while dazzling diminutive dragonfly dances,
                                                                          darts,
                                                                                  then dips,
         freely floating,
                         finds fretboard finger, finally, in repose

Red-breasted robins run,
                       ramble,
               recede,
                               reappear
     turning, turning, turning
                                      to
                                               the
                                                          tune

Beautiful bright-blonde butterflies
                                                flit and
                                                       fluttter
                       becalm and bask
                              in
                      late-spring sun
              perched      presently       on
                             perennial purple pond iris

Playing “On and On” outdoors
               on this awe-inspiring afternoon
                      with well-loved warm-sounding
                               traditional A-shaped mandolin

When you walk into a jungle,
the first footfall splits veins
with epinephrine, the spike 
of quick, deep uncertainty. 

Bared teeth are expected, 
the chase of two straight, 
white canines like too-real
figures standing in shadow. 

Viscera lies on a carpet
of moss, beside your heart
tumbling to ignite some 
apt, biological failsafe.  

Does it activate in time? 
Do you even realize? 

Fear in the Shadow of Pulse Nightclub
 
I.                    Two days after graduation my daughter shaved her head.
Mostly.  Leaving a crop of short stalks
like splintered toothpicks protruding from her scalp.
She asked me to touch her hair,
feel it bristle. We both laughed as I discovered
the resilience of her new hair.
How it rises without any self-consciousness
between my fingers
and then settles back
when I let go.  

II.              I can see the shape of her skull now,
like when she emerged from the only epidural I ever had.  
Wanted to have all four daughters, natural. Wanted
to dig a deep hole with my fingers out in the bush.
Wanted to squat on my haunches and birth these babies
pushing life out of heaving life
alone circle breathing through my labor.
Wanted to severe the umbilical cord
with my own incisors. Wanted
to plant the placenta under a Linden tree.
Wanted to comingle her blood and my blood,
with the raw dirt of the earth.      
And this planting would guarantee       
she will always return home, feel connected to the earth,      
grow to be a gardener herself, maybe.       
Be eternally rooted to this firm ground.      

III.            After Pulse nightclub
with 49 lives gunned down,
I worry she may be a target.
Scripture wielded as a weapon.      
Don’t ask that guy – he wants to hang them all      
45 says of Pence. Taking aim at her
with abomination or blasphemy.  
In their crosshairs.   

IV.           She identifies as a woman.
Prefers the pronouns she/her.
Abandoned the strappings of a bra years ago.
Refuses to line her eyes with kohl.
Paints no blush on her lips.  

I remember how the freckles appeared
every June. Across her nose and her cheeks.
We would count them in the evening
by the light of a jar of lightning bugs.
Catch and release.  

V.               One night we saw Milk.
An auditorium bursting
with LGBTQ+ folks and their allies.  
My daughter turns to me:              
Are we all just sitting ducks               
for someone filled with hatred?  

I wonder if insanity will enter,
desiring to rid the world
of who and what he refuses to understand.
An advocate of conversion therapy.
Or a victim of such torture.  

I worry all the time. In the bathroom,
when someone mistakes her for a male.
On the train to Chicago, roaring out of the Midwest,
gathering for the Pride Festival. Standing in line at Hucks Gas Station,
where cars are draped in confederate flags.
Where affection between two women is shouted down.  

And so I ready myself for an onslaught.      
Pivot my body toward hers,      
determined to cover her      
with my mother self      
if bullets ever take over the soundtrack. 

Maybe if I keep writing poems about you
I can construct the reality
where it’s all okay.
Where I can spend far too much time 
recalling the feeling of your hands on mine
Where I can imagine that the way you look at me
means what I think it might
Where the constraints of our real lives
are the things that are fiction.
In a poem
you can be anything 
My muse
My imperfect fantasy
My next self-destructive narrative 
I can be 
the one you lie awake thinking about 
No more than a river between us
Nothing
but the rocky banks
and the lights on the bridge
I can write it all.

A line, an exposition
extension of the pen,
cajoles its body with
quasi-critical realness
or deferrence. Speak
a form into mirage:
the trees on the date,
chemicals in its brain,
lasting words exchanged
between love and coffee stains.

This data collector, binge watched all spring,
is void of opinions— stuck in the ground, foot dyed

clay orange, with creeping thyme creeping by.
This aggregator spills out harsh facts,

of the lavender bushes whose feet will rot
if left too wet— of humans downstream

along a steep path who might be swept away.
Surely, later this summer, joy will spill out—

it will tell of those fed, nourished, bathed in delights.
But for now, this open square in the earth warns.

Dawn right after the rain
Blazing pink sun
Intermixed with ominous black and fluffy white clouds
Droplets sparkling on grass fields
Wildflowers lining the stone-fenced road
Mare and foal silhouetted against an old black barn
Breathtaking beauty on an ordinary morning

Global warming’s done run away
with the temperature tucked 
under suns armpit,  I’m afraid 
Lizard-like habits have hidden
us under gravel in a game of
Hide-and-go seek from
deadly laser rays 
only to find by the time
The sun is done toying with us
When the sidewalk is safe again
And the floor is no longer lava
Life will look like
a library book, overdue

They turn away—
truth is softer than promise,
love left in the dusk.

Grief grows in silence,
memory clings to her hands—
hope aches, undivided.

After all she gave,
she stands—worthy of her rest,
gentle in release.