Poetry

Picking out a wreath at Clancy’s 
in the brisk elbows of light
I smell mountains you love

It is their idea to peruse the maps—
the cuff of their sweater, rocktrumpet

pink, not warm from Denver’s summer-acting 
winter, but my wrist chaffing against theirs.

Sun at rest on the mountain faces—

I see it from my window seat,
the mountain rippling under wing,
my dad beside me 
recalling a double-decker freeway I drew
in charcoal when I was six
after it collapsed a few blocks away
in the great quake

Lorca saw the Duende separate from the muse & the angel. Bodily. Inheritance. Tlazoltéotl, all passages through you.

Once I was lost on an island—Paros, paradise—
and I followed a stray dog to the center of town.

Dogs know the way. I don’t. I was with JT,
and we’d been drinking ouzo and laughing

No thoughts to say about the moon. The novelist jokes about not being a poet. I feel the lie.

Night, only barely. The shadow
of a bird has just tucked itself
into yonder branches. A black
feral cat skulks his way behind
the hydrangeas, which soon
will bloom.

Skull-faced Venus impales you. Chalchiuhtlicue, Goddess of the East. Venus, West. Directions, too, in conflict. War inside creates war outside. All the outsides. All the insides.

One by one the neighborhood songbirds visited
and stripped us of our brightest threads of pain

carrying them off for purposes that we couldn’t
quite fathom. So we got a dog, felt a little better.

Ixchel, I feel you crossing. Night womb. Tell me where the seeds go.