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

Just as Technology
has shifted from
being a vertical —
organizationally
in a stack above or
below other usual
equal silos

I will never see your secret spaces
listen to the bold songs of birds
or the screeches of primate tribes
in trees along slow muddy waters.
Nor will I spy the silhouette
of the silent jaguar’s shadow

Our kids march in the streets for Climate Change.
They’re chanting we are running out of time
disturbed by watching all the rising seas
from hurricanes, huge fires, torrential rains.
Their fears and tears give me a bit of hope
that our vast world will flourish when I’m gone.

I served 20 years 4 months 3 days
for a theft I didn’t commit.
Solitary. Abuse. Neglect.
Suffering. Shame.
Victim of mistaken identity.
Suggestive questioning. Self-interest.
Gross negligence. Prosecutorial misconduct.

In third grade, one afternoon,
we were ushered into the auditorium
for a 16mm animated film
about dinosaurs.
As comets and asteroids fell,
pocking the earth,
so did the huge creatures,

Mascara swirling down her face,
the woman with sagging eyelids
stands on the chipped concrete
like the tall factory pipe
connected to the power plant machines.
She doesn’t think about her plight,
only the fact that she must make the ends meet
in order to feed her 2 children.

these days the smiles are scripted
to induce the flow of joy
in hopes
they amplify an initial step
to overcome the inertia
of years of climate induced apathy
i still remember the days
when i did not have to remind myself
to smile or breathe deep

In a cold winter thought
I grabbed the earth by its head of trees
and ripped upward to free the firmament
beneath.
No earthworms or other secrets.
Human figures entwined
in angered roots.

When he awakens, the dream tucks itself in.
At bedtime, the dream starts the night shift.
And so
Inside the lazy contraction of slumber is an energetic stretch.

was in high dudgeon the colonel yelled

lying flat your pug-rasps in
in petering
juxtaposition of stuttered blasts
out get out

You are this
which is not
that,
that
which is not
this.
You owe such and such
to whoever and whom,

I stop walking,
and contemplate
the way the thin
arm of this tree
once bent upward,
before stretching
out over the river.

I wait for a sign that you need me:

a wilting arm, dry soil,
but you give me nothing

so I trickle water into your mouth.

Just enough to tame my own thirst.

We take our color from the mines;
A frost of ash atop our coarse dark hair.

With brimstone flecks in the linarite of our
eyes, We see what lies in darkness—

Black holes to hell.

A declaration from the district office
we will not be teaching cursive this year
no pens will be required, no extra paper
we will not be teaching cursive this year.