The fire burns a static air—
The water sticks in chaliced flames, elbow to elbow.
Gray and warm Saturdays
ablaze in gasoline and cardboard.
Somewhere it stops—forearm to ankle,
spray to neck and shoulder—
Strategy in asphalt encourages
men saying, "Oh, blessed be, blessed be."
Hands raised like offerings to the silhouetted robins
dropping out of skies, egg by blue
eye watching from the pump.
She's quiet, hands on her knees,
squatted over the puddles.
"I have too many white skirts,"
she says, fingers waving the hem,
stitches turned dark and roots aching up through the stain.

Quiet Out

This girl never really wanted
to be a runaway. There went
star-studded boots
with a moonshoe print,
hot tar mottled to catch up.
Her dad drove by her at 5 miles
an hour, hovering on brake,
Skyline all the way down
the summer street. Your mom 
is worried. I know—she's still
your mom. She wanted
to stumble to those long arms
keeping her company.
She held out for a while
and slid back thanks
softened with "I would never
really leave you."

When he died, first
hot-tar rain of the year,
she was dropped off
into a plate of neighbor's
spaghetti sliding out the tines
because the sauce was all water.
When did her fingers stop
shaking up gravity—to push
her tongue in, swallow
down low-air conditions?

Tracks to the horizon both ways.
That iron oxide rubbed silver,
line after line, ping after cling
to what you know, girl.
The trains could move faster
than heaven's freeways,
yellow lines behind the dust-
smudged Milky Way
all in the rear-view.

Intimate Pause

Remember the linoleum
yellowed with tiny blue-
cornflowered edges?
The base of a first home,
a first "yours" in beams
of sunlight. Sprinkled
over the cream counters
in dime-sized glow.
Snowed-in laughter
warming the windows.

A child wanders barefoot
through the house,
purple nightshirt
dragged over her shoulder
with sleep. She sucks
on the corner of a staticky
blanket and curls beneath
the table, on top of a moth
she cannot see. The clock ticks
along refrigerator mumble.

The front door opens
sunrise, top off a can
to spill mandarin up
the stairs, over the linoleum
in tiny wading pools.
Remember the man
with heavy hands, quietly
wrapping up a package
of tangled hair and deep
breath? A pink rose
pruned and dropped
deep-vased on the stove
for true morning
and a mother's rising eyes.

Pressure in the Chest

There is a hangman
draped in emerald on the wall.
Palms pressed flat
on wooden boards and nail-
heads bent up over their edges
like they could pray from their
exposed tips. Someone
calls up from the floor
for the curtains to be drawn,
nobody needs to be seeing
the room going dark,
but the hangman presses
harder into the steel.
Slowly bends and stirs his hands
through the soft moisture
of air—cheek against cheek,
breathing mutual lovers of erupted
nights. Lips to the floor,
the room falls black
and sky spills into him,
swell after swell.

Not a single word washed in rain

I'm not sure I can sleep
with the ghosts.
Laced
frostbite and heatstroke
fall down their wrists,
draped and drowned—
waking waters
dew over my eyelids.
In a rush of momentary
panic you've splintered—
static in your hair.

I turn the electric tinge to my mouth
with a thoughtful kiss—
I cannot find the name for it now.
Let our hair be cold in the sunrise.
We could lay our bodies
into the quiet God
at the smalls of our backs.
Foothill penstemon stains
feather into something else.
Saffron star-spots trickle into the dirt.

Surely I am tired.
I can feel
the petrichor, thick
as the mountains beneath the snow.

So just say it, say something

            If you gaze into starlight for long enough, the deck wood suddenly splinters below you. You follow your own pupil between Osiris and the night's Cassiopeia, gingerly gathered in skirt-folds of black more-fallen stars behind her never smile. Here the splinters sting your hands, oak sliding between the yellow tenderness of your palms, beneath the swirling calluses that shiver with shine. Black wood. Black because it's dark. Black because the rods can only catch so much, you suppose. Can only gather in cylindrical graphs, light, light, light, red dots across the blank. Don't touch your stinging palms to your stinging eyes—don't make alloy of this sliver. Stand shakily, knee by knee, broken boards below you. Your blood pounds lay down lay down through your back, to the small curve below mid-brain, right on the joint of round head to soft neck to carbonated bone.


A quick-write "meaning to writing" exercise from fiction class.