Conception
Things got too hot, you couldn’t stop
your dams from breaking.
Your swollen rivers, thick and thawed
washed over me in white water tides.
Then, those frozen tears
you hold back out of hard habit
melted, at last, and dripped down
your round cheekbones to mix
and mingle with our sweat
that condensed on my chest
until we collapsed together sobbing
but safe now with nothing left.
It really could be like that: Tension,
friction, and life-giving release.
Tsunamis, floods, hurricanes,
pain, passion, volcanic eruption.
A seed settling into shuddering stillness,
the moment of a new world’s conception.
Jade and Other Jewels
Back behind an abandoned brothel,
half-way between Mina,
nowhere, and Tonopah, Nevada,
ghosts chase magpies through the mist.
Ghosts don’t like the colors
of magpie feathers
because they reflect
the history of this land.
Black and blue are
the beatings they took.
White, the blank space
they wish would replace
all the green feathers
that remind them
of the age-old quest
for jade and other jewels
that killed them.
That’s why if you watch
magpies eat the dead,
they’ll haunt you until
you become a hollow bone
instead of a soft circle of skin.
Skin doesn’t shatter.
But life, like water,
flows through bones better
and flesh, in the end,
always rots
if it isn’t eaten by magpies
before the ghosts in the mist
chase them all away.
Stillborn Yolk
The mockingbird cannot read
other people’s poetry.
She mimics their songs.
But only to prove
she can, indeed, sing.
It does not matter, she thinks,
who sings it better:
the poet or her or the wind
through the tree she perches in.
When her speckled babies crack
and stillborn yolk spills out,
any sound is better than
true silence, empty and dead,
or the incessant gnaw
of insatiable chainsaws
with scrambled egg
on their face.
Taking Coyotes Seriously
I was so lost I found myself
out there in the sagebrush
taking coyotes seriously.
Their instructions involved
smoothing the sand out,
sifting through the dirt
with my fine-toothed hands,
searching for bones shattered
by cavalry carbine bullets,
unspeakable tragedies still unspoken,
and stories no one would tell me.
I blew on the earth,
trying to rekindle the sparks
of the desert’s memories.
Nothing happened.
You cannot get blood from stone,
but I hoped desert soil was different.
Turns out, when spilled blood soaks
into soil, it doesn’t give it back.
And why wouldn’t desert soil
be a lot like us? Somethings no one
ever wants to remember.
Silver Spoons
Stabbed in the back by silver spoons
wielded by those who care more
about table manners than the famine.
They spoon-feed themselves
on what they find in my heart.
They take more than that,
finally scraping my ribs clean
of my last inclination to resist.
Flashfloods toss my skeleton
like whale bones in a hurricane
into slot canyons where the long
conversations of tectonic plates
grind me into salt to spice the soil.
It's only when I sink into earth
that I learn betrayal is nothing
new under the sun.
I feel the knife in each skyscraper,
oil well, and open pit mine.
I hear each degree Celsius climb
the thermometer's mercury ladder
to the tune of clinking silver pieces.
But the worst pain of all
is the way some of her children
sell her out to declare
her pain, pleasure
and her pleasure, pain.
They think smog makes the sunset
more beautiful. They cut off mountains
they decide shouldn't be there.
They tell rivers where to go.
They capture freely given sunshine,
yoke the wind, and divide
what should have always been indivisible.
They say they are color blind
while seeing only in black and white.
Their treachery began
when they forgot that clean water
always quenches your thirst. Now,
they hallucinate the queerest of theories:
that which can be transgressed
must be transgressed.
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