Poetry

Between Los Angeles and Oakland, 
there was snow on the grass-covered mountains,
which made a strange pattern, like brushstrokes
on paper.

Tired of silence, tired of rock, tired of orchestration,
let me tune us in this evening to FM 91.1, The Point: 
“All y’all’s favorite home for the candid sounds 
of people sleeping.” 

your hand swells my neck, pretty, you say
i am, no matter how decimal-small. 
my eyelash flutters across your shoulder.
gravity. you land on my chest skin—

say i was a careless shutting
of language an accident
sound whirling into the guttur

the owl refuses to dispense any wisdom
but has a few questions of its own:

the ogre of gratitude dangling like a chandelier from the rearview mirror asks if
you know how lucky you are, if you’ve meditated on that yet, if your heart

My therapist says a boy with a secret
is easy to control. I wonder how
Steve learned mine, if I told him

in exchange for a public chance at a longer private life, you give them
not your body, but your body’s one error in calculation. the swerve,

At just the age the unconscious
cheerleader was []
by four football players,
I suspect I was []
by Steve. 

She’d gathered ramps in the woods, although she found them 
A hyperbole of the food world, an over-priced scallion

With a finish of garlic scapes. But finding them in the forest, 
He thought, and picking them with her strong hands,