Poetry

Tears sometimes come in a bottle. Open and apply several times daily.

Your image is on my credit card, you and the old red, white, and blue.

When she sleeps, Shakespeare writes one more sonnet we’ll never read.

A Good Samaritan refused is no more good than any Bad Samaritan.

The five notes, slowly, over & over, and with some light intent.

I hear her voice in the shivering tambourines of leaves.

That’s why Mam drinks whiskey. That’s why he drinks whiskey too.

We walk in light so steep I can see each single stitch of your sweater.

I only feel that here, only here, in this one place, a small rise.

Something crossing the Golden Gate catches the sun and ignites.

Think of the fish whose stripes appear only on cooking through. Fold each thought: the highway stop where toilet paper is piled.

This body is all I have, I say. Some days it is still not enough.

In a future we believe in, these plants will all be ghosts.

He doesn’t notice the cop car rolling slow-motion into the station.

This must be what it’s like to be seen by God as we inch toward the infinite.

When I dream of lovers, I rarely see faces. It’s better if we never touch.

You can learn to exhale. Let the marrow of dusk leak onto your knees. Tongues rattling, we are scared into daughters again & again. The act of silence: heavy as rain. Heavy enough to believe in.

Our bed a garden of the littlest sighs of our waking. Our room, abstract.

I know you want your mother’s dial tone like you want a KFC box.

Let me stay here, in the thick of the sweetness, just a moment longer.

I lift my wine flask, drunk with rivers and hills.

A strange odd lost duck day all over—sunrise with a honed edge.

He is not a man, but an empty shell, a creature who laughs to stop the shame.

We hung our posters at the drugstore, at the grocery, at city hall. I tacked up a 1970s Earth Day poster from my mother’s classroom. We tie-dyed shirts, and I bought everyone a plastic visor to paint.

I lost my medicine bag from back when I believed in magic.

Some days Barbie Chang wants to hang up her Asian boots.

Barbie Chang asks why the evil one always has black hair.

Subtract for the cigarettes, the bourbon, the sleepless nights.

His mouth hardens whenever their son’s name is mentioned.

Beyond the glib off-white palisades lies the answer to an urban dream.