season’s greetings — and reminders — I hate to write of anything but hope on the holidays. I know we’re eager for family and resolutions, you have a new cookbook and your niece was just born, she’s adorable in her penguin jumpsuit, her grandparents do adore her. I hate to tell you anything except Congratulations, or…

You saw a land change color — from “the red people” to red in rivers, to rednecks — you gave thanks. Tinting fresh water with drawn-out life. You convalesced from fever, her hand on your forehead — panting with enervation, you gave thanks. You saw many others not so lucky…

for S.P. / 1932–1963 — Today you are underground, breathing words into dirt even there, swallowing the life from small worms and taking your sweet time dying. Imagining awakening, humoring the thought with poetry. For a woman cannot die having smarted death so many times — Instead you make a mockery of it, talking to…

I can sense my life / under my finger — Even in green grass some moments are grey — I seldom open my mouth for the weight of my jaw, reluctant eyelids, deep-set sockets — and some do smear, into weeks of wet grape stems, overcast and overfull stomachs, voices through double-paned glass, sleeping in, I am a walking pamphlet…

Here are our flowers of fire. — Tonight, Beatty burns. And Sierra Nevada and Santa Fe and the Gulf of Mexico which we sit on. Plumes play in Plumas, named after childhood friends, Richard, Dixie, Kennedy, Eugene, Rafael — Here are our flowers of fire for the earth. If we cannot stay long, at least let it…

“At length I wandered towards these mountains, and have ranged through their immense recesses, consumed by a burning passion which you alone can gratify.” Mary Shelley, The Modern Prometheus I’ve been haunting locations fraught with evasive Frankenstein stares I’ve been hunting down my maker to whom I am a corpse, …

one day my wife will be a woman right now she is a specter / except in the space between lips / / in the moment it takes my teacher to say / / it could also be a boy and a boy or / / a girl and a…

There will be moments in front of the mirror when the summer has saturated and almost sun-burned your skin and resignedly, you resolve to love it anyway. There will be moments when a voice jars you, suggesting you try something else. Callow, you will criticize where you come from except…

trigger warning: sexual assault (non-graphic) Today is April 24th, 2021 she said a man’s stares stick to her on the ride home from work / me too a man’s voice was wormed into her with the first outfit she chose / me too their mom never got over what it…