i am outside in the oven
chin ups and dips
and laps[e] in the grass

around the poured concrete
and picnic tables bolted down
with music in factory
ear buds playing loud
enough to drown
the chatter of fat, angry men

in the darkest of caves
illuminated by night
i sought answers in your shape
you sought refuge in mine.

it was lust, masked as love
the highs, worth the lows
you were broken
mysterious
destructive
light.

Weary sun sighs deeply.
Rattlesnakes seek solace.
Tumbleweeds bleed wisdom.
Saguaro reach deep into green pockets
of scattered water loose
in rancid blankets of arid certainty.
Scorpions seethe, swallowing sand,
each and every granule
a microcosm of the infinite.

When she delivered him, occipito posterior, the back
of his skull cradled against her sacrum,
when he crowned, face up, chin up,
it was her father’s chin, her father’s
nose, his broad strong Scotish countenance.
My father was there, wearing a hospital mask, ear to ear,
stretched across his face like a sheet spread at birth,
she would say later it was the first time
she’d seen him cry, her husband.

We are projections on a sheet in the yard,
suspicious spools of film liberated from metal cans.
When there is nothing left to play, the children retreat
to flashlight tag, and the women refresh their wine.

The men huddle in the darkness.
Someone is talking about the circus,

It came rustling through the mangrove forest
howler monkeys with their megaphone voices
heard long before seen swinging through trees
on sweltering Costa Rica mornings

the pacific surf came rolling
sometimes pounding and sometimes
playfully lapping the black volcanic sands

My cousins and I bunk in the impromptu nursery
cribs crowded together with a sewing machine

and drapery fabrics and unfinished curtains

near the sunset bedroom originally Olive Plant’s,
across from the Roosevelt room and the guest bath
white porcelain tile, needle surround shower, fixtures of brass.

Three chains:
The first hanging in the hall
Just within reach, but
High enough not to disturb traffic through the short hallway

when i was eighteen
i lost sensation
in my cheeks. it was only
years later, once i felt the
slightest tingling
return to that same skin
that i let myself mourn
its absence (easier to numb
with positivity and denial
than to recount
the beauty and
brokenness
that led to its loss).

SHIRT
A favorite blue shirt wears my loyalty.
Beside –
hangs a pima cotton. Fine stitch
for my affection.
GLOVE
When young, I wore a glove of wonder
snug to my hand.
Held with fame of little round stars
falling in day.

my skin is a lead bodysuit
and other than the hope
that it might crush me one day
it hides my vibrating bones
so that I am the only one
that feels them shaking
inside of me

If I had an amazing tool
it would be a decoder ring
straight from my cereal box
that would morph into a briefcase,
when I pressed a button
into the hand tooled leather satchel.

At my picture window, I raise the blinds
On the graveyard side. And, it’s you, July,
Lovely ghost? Not changed much since you were ten.
That’s how old I was when Pap George sold me
To Seth Woodall. I was thin as a seam,
Fearless, too; Runaway? Not so bold, see?

It was all that jazz
it was the city — San Francisco
it was the venue — Keystone Korner
a former topless bar on Vallejo Street transformed
into a world class club its interior intimate its memory indelible
& all that jazz

The General Sherman bounds 1,487m
all wood
***
Like a bird god lean and hard
Sherman surveys Atlanta
His face bewhiskered, pockmarked
his choice to end this here

Gold-flecked dust ignites in waves.
I kiss my desert skin.

The coyote’s song lulls me
before I count the sheep.

The doorknob will turn
before the lock’s clasp

It’s called The Cave of Forgotten Dreams
this place where handprints
with broken finger
wave at squint-eyed scientists

where prehistoric rhino, too,
looks up and down

Stiletto drops like river
Runoff echo in the cave.
Once dawn’s cables bridge
The canyon, you, first
Diurnal venturer,
Step out to punish pavement;

You found malleable a woman of uncandled clay;
I suppose it was she who gave you the carver’s adze,
Saying, “I just want to be close to you” –
You smiled through the splinters in your gloss
And took lacquered fingers to the handle.

We’ve had enough! We’re taking it back!
The earth once belonged to the docile and us—
the wild—but no more will you, the puffed-up,

two-legged man, raze our forests and our swamps,
no more spew your chemicals into our homes
or fell our forests and set our lairs ablaze,

They tell me that I’m not dying.
That my limbs aren’t burning.
That my face isn’t as ashen as I make it out to be.
But what do they know –
the false prophets with their loose lips, tailored suits, and painted-up lies?

They’ve painted your tank blue so you forget
how your paws flung moonstone stars across the
Northern Lights, how your cubs, seal-small, clung to
falling spires of snow and scarred, songless ice,

How can two words capture the magic of such a creature?
How can a name hold the essence of anything? I wonder, cradling
huckleberries from the bush, how to express the way my hands
are left a misty purple,

Let’s go to the beach today
It’s closed, I know, the Great Highway, the great expanse
But I know a way in-
I’m a scientist.
I’ll show them my credentials, say you’re my assistant

We’re here to study the shoreline, what’s left of it