Poetry

The cold is a knife-slice on the skin.

There’s a moment—barely—when you see both
ocean and bay from the 280 as it mills north
near Millbrae, the waters flash what they know
of daylight, and you register being a sort of gliding porch
before dunking back under cypress

I don’t lie, but I try to make myself sound worse off than I am.

Milk-tack, sugar cubes, cotton balls, chalk; 
coffee filters, marshmallows, artificial

It begins with a gesture and then grows

Because she paints barefoot, she’s barefoot in his painting
of her painting. Well, not painting, but modeling for him
as the painter she is and gazing toward her ostensible model,

You don’t start at zero. You start way below zero.

I went to God but found
I was fog, expected to dissolve

chicken breast soaked in vanilla, 
aluminum foil and leather doused in WD-40,
one day on a pack of green apple bubble gum. 
lured a large swirl around a grapevine, lead to a plastic bag 

Ancestral or learned, such threats, 
   tonight’s charry staircase of heaven—
crash, storming, splitting flicker shards,