POEM A DAY 2019

Close to My Heart

Los dientes

he exudes confidence
you think
until you see him
with a brand new set of veneer teeth
made in Columbia

The Witcher

I've never loved you more than this moment
Imagining you cruising for boys
Your eyes green and clear
Surveying the field of emotionless encounters
Just to fill the time
Your predator intrigues me
I'd like to watch you let him off leash
I promise I don't think I'll mind.

When we decide to stay in
We're under the airplane blanket
Offered to me by an Icelandic attendant
When she had nothing else to cover my sadness
While I watched my father shake and stare
Into the middle distance of Row 1 Seat C
I'm watching you play video games
Wishing you were doing it differently
Knowing I couldn't do it any better.

MY GRANDMOTHER’S QUILT

Display in her house.
Here a layer for cold nights.
Too fragile to wash.

Poem Not Set in Chihuahuita Park

There's a little road called "Garcia Way"
along one side of Chihuahuita Park in El Paso
The other side is the border fence
and children play on the swings and slides.
The birds pass high over that fence like any other.

But this poem is set in Penn Valley, Pennsylvania
far from the Rio Grande, far from Iraq
and Afghanistan, far from Charlottesville, and so
the threat is real, but I want to believe it is small.

Nothing forces us to look
so we look away
nothing can make you know
what you know
you can play dumb, wait for it
to pass. The night
will find you, pick you up
by your earlobes
drag you out of your bed
and down the stairs
to the glow of the kitchen
and make you work at forgetting
for another six hours
until the sun slowly leaks
into the morning sky
setting trees ablaze
along the horizon.

All I know, Jaime, is that you loved that cat,
and put it down when it was time.

janus

we piled blankets in the kitchen
we looped back around
we saw you on the beach
cold from waiting in sandals
as the night set in
mystical for reappearing
almost unrecognizable for a moment
we passed a crystal around
sitting on the boardwalk--
were we saying goodbye?
i had to leave before the ceremony ended
my blood told me go
you were at the beach in ireland
you were at the beach in mexico
knee deep in sun grass
i looped around you
and forgot to touch your shoulder
forgot the spread the blanket
on the matted meadow
forgot how to walk arm in arm
delicate elbows woven
or if we used to do that

Mystic Chord

Something popped out,
the mystic chord,
I tried to play it in my head,
but couldn't read the notes above the stave,
I always lost the proportion
when writing them out prior.

Returning today, thrown
by the loss of which village
overlapped which,
my high notes, toppling
off the manuscript,
just copying patterns,
and strewn in replication,
clattering the house style.

The order of things,
yoked and re-yoked
to time,
shifting nodes.

This road didn't ever seem linked to
that, a sucking wound
for what it has now pulled together,
it cleaves something else apart.