A variety of animals peered
at them from behind giant trees and fish would leap out of the streams. They would work from
sunrise to sunset tending the crops, fishing or stacking the stones. They didn’t dance or shout or
sing or make jokes…
Before now, before the stone cold reality of the present, you lived for a long time in a place you
learned to call only half-jokingly, Alternative Facts. How you got there: your life spun apart and
you found yourself without warning in an infinite chasm of what-ifs and if-onlys…
What the sounds are wanting
What the reading of this is wanting
Is the limb like something
To be taken to the pillar…
“consider”
“pray like the moon”
“water understands”
“Baby Teeth”
“Grandmother”
“Changeling”
“Bargain”
“IV. Ladies and Gentlemen”
The way my mouth is either steadfastly peaceable or very, very surprised. The way I look at my lifelines like train tracks. Train tracks like window frames. Window frames like vacancies. Hands like loss…
I imagine bright pink
tongues finding delicious residue
and the skanky build-up on coffee cups…
I rebel and put the wooden handle chopping
knives in with the rest of the silverware.
“I Wanted to Stay Longer in the Oak Villa”
“Mistake of Hemispheres”
“Pleasure Pocket”
I want to become this story. I want to have never heard it.
I want the day to begin with coffee and weather and light
out the window, to be lost in the moments and have that be all…
“The enclosed poems are a sequence of psalms "songs" on the themes of spirituality, mortality, and the underground.” - Darryl Lorenzo Wellington
I dreamed that we had
raspberry-mint tea on a weekend morning,
and it stained our blond wood table. Then
it kept on pouring, and we were dancing
in the red and pink…
Dig your fingers deep into the wet clay soil
that squeezes at the fingertips the further down you go,
The rotting calendar pages bloom spores the color of fur on
the paralyzed cat rotting underneath the lilac bush,
turning the petals the most brilliant shades of blue…
The only nearness
I feel is silence.
God gave us these flaws
I’m nurturing them to my likeness
nature intended openness—
"Crystal Cove National Park, California”
"Crossing”
"Upon Seeing a Glimpse of Your Thigh One Evening"
“Upon Considering Waiting as Circular Movement”
“Your First Gift is Making Stone Out of Everything”
“Sometimes the Moon is Missing”
At age nine, a book told me that ghosts could fall in love with revenge. The words stitched
themselves around my heart and held it together…
The painter has been so vague I can make
the location whatever I fancy but not completely
of my own fabrication - her pensiveness,
her solitary walk just ended by the water
dictate a scenery I can’t ignore, a geography
of no known place, except for fleeting thoughts…
