Poetry

Is programming not a kind of poetry?
Ones and zeros of the heart.

Who knows how many of us 
                                                  you’ve killed, dead set 
on what flows beneath, your mouth

At thirty, I am a child again learning
banana, apple, and orange,
clasping words and fumbling my meanings.

Driving in the American West, reading Celan
and the Mahabharata. After the war,
Arjuna drops the bow forged by Brahma back
into the ocean, relinquishing it

Night’s endlessness taps at the mind,
my jet lag a constant drip down the windows.
Because I am here for a month, a girl returned
to her mother, I let myself go soft

What about the man who cannot touch 
anyone without them morphing 
into the only woman he loved and lost? Not recklessly,
but like a river diverted by a stone’s weight, 

In the end 
the world is empty 
enough to move in 
—to learn how best to hold a lantern 
drunk in the forestdark— 
 

Between Los Angeles and Oakland, 
there was snow on the grass-covered mountains,
which made a strange pattern, like brushstrokes
on paper.

Tired of silence, tired of rock, tired of orchestration,
let me tune us in this evening to FM 91.1, The Point: 
“All y’all’s favorite home for the candid sounds 
of people sleeping.” 

your hand swells my neck, pretty, you say
i am, no matter how decimal-small. 
my eyelash flutters across your shoulder.
gravity. you land on my chest skin—