Poetry

A little death—a sky 
with geese stitched on.
My fears are all explainable— 
it’s cortisol, it’s fate, 
the jerk of mercury, 
the joints’ arthritic 
prescience about rain.

Senior year he made us girls file into the gym for martial arts.

Next year, you may need to protect yourselves, he bellowed.

Lorca saw the Duende separate from the muse & the angel. Bodily. Inheritance. Tlazoltéotl, all passages through you.

Once I was lost on an island—Paros, paradise—
and I followed a stray dog to the center of town.

Dogs know the way. I don’t. I was with JT,
and we’d been drinking ouzo and laughing

No thoughts to say about the moon. The novelist jokes about not being a poet. I feel the lie.

Night, only barely. The shadow
of a bird has just tucked itself
into yonder branches. A black
feral cat skulks his way behind
the hydrangeas, which soon
will bloom.

Skull-faced Venus impales you. Chalchiuhtlicue, Goddess of the East. Venus, West. Directions, too, in conflict. War inside creates war outside. All the outsides. All the insides.

One by one the neighborhood songbirds visited
and stripped us of our brightest threads of pain

carrying them off for purposes that we couldn’t
quite fathom. So we got a dog, felt a little better.

Ixchel, I feel you crossing. Night womb. Tell me where the seeds go.