ash

The night I get home

I drive upstate

State trooper pulls me over for dimmed headlight

says it is illegal not to emit light that confuses insects and stars

Without moon 

how will ocean know how to billow?

Without moths

how will I speak to my mom?

She said she would return as a butterfly

not knowing butterflies would die slowly

from brain cancer too

At the end of the city

the statue of liberty

is not visible through ash

that man in coffee shop with $8 drink merrily refers to as fog

I move towards the water

and call out to the dead, but 

we have become estranged in the absence of blue

Only ash from the north

travels to receive my prayer

My sky is the same as yours

There is nowhere but here

There is nowhere left to run 

 

21st century angels

I had this friend once, she liked to drive out to the edge of the city at night to watch planes fly in. One night she called late, told me to come outside. I walked out onto the porch barefoot and there she was waiting. She rolled down her window and told me to get in. We drove out through the deserted city towards its ends, down old industrial roads with trash pressed into the gaps in the sidewalk. We idled in the car at the entrance of an old military base and waited. I asked her what she liked about them. To me, the planes are like 21st century angels, she said, her red hair bloody with the night’s withholding shadows. Before my mom died she told me she was gonna come back as a butterfly. She was being eaten alive by cancer, it was close to the end and all she could do was lay there, sinking. I guess flying sounded like the best thing in the world. Well... there aren’t many butterflies any more. So I come here.

We waited for a long time in the dark without speaking. My feet were cold. The radio squeezed out old punk songs, and I had the feeling of remembering a time I never knew—one in which people gathered in rooms to be with each other. Life isn’t meant to be felt alone, I thought, looking out at barbed wire. To our left a white ring of light was emerging on the horizon, a blazing comet finally coming to end it once and for all. It grew larger, until passing overhead with a rumble that could drown out the call of a thousand birds, if there were any. Wasn’t that beautiful? She breathed, exhilarated. I leaned back into my seat, exhausted. Can you take me home?

We sped back towards town along stilted highways. Brick houses, strip malls, anywhere. It was early spring, I remembered. Where were flowers? My bones felt heavy, a sick sac of stones, dense with the weight of earth’s silence...

hand that feeds

Jo Jo Baby was twelve years old when they nabbed her. She’d followed meticulous procedure as usual—man enters room, man takes off all clothes and jewelry, all of man’s clothes and jewelry go inside special zip lock bag, zip lock bag goes inside bathtub, bathroom door is closed. Only this time Jo Jo was distracted by the particular putridity of this man’s stench, and didn’t shut the bathroom door completely. They heard everything via the tiny wire in his gold wrist watch and were outside waiting. Jo Jo Baby was thirteen years old when she gave birth to Nelson, son of the prison guard who stuck his dick in her every afternoon after lunch. Seven years were added to her sentence when she tried to abort him with a number two pencil under the table during indoor recreation. She gave birth with ankles and wrists shackled tight to the metal bed frame and they were only released once they took him away. Three days later she was found in her cell with cut wrists. They took her to the hospital already dead. The day nurse laughed when he saw her rolling in lifeless. I remember that whore, he said, lifting the elastic band of her bloody pants, couldn’t forget a hole as sorry as that one. Jo Jo Baby was already halfway to hell. Or so they said. The last words scratched onto her prison cell’s wall? WHAT MEANS DEATH ON THIS PLANET OF RELENTLESS ASSAULT. They sent the small, empty body to the furnace, took the ashes out with the trash. Sixteen years later to the day Nelson sat on the front lawn looking up at the clouds. Who’s my real mother? He asked them. Upon hearing his words the clouds parted. He thought for a moment he could make out a face in the space between them.Time for dinner! Came the evening call. He went inside and slurped his chicken soup. By the time he cleared his plate, he’d already forgotten about the whole thing. 

—OCT2025

3.8.25

Whimper fashioned as moan

Reach inside and extricate string of stones

Empty all water ever held by ocean onto 7-piece L-shaped sectional dick

In the 2009 sedan, in the slanted driveway, under pancake sky

I tell her with straight lips, I have chosen this

At dusk the world is a single rusted highway

Mired by trees, loose and lifeless

At a stop light I glance over

The pins in your eyes hold centuries

Once she carried a secret in her heart too long

and a cancerous mound grew over it 

2.6.26

Sitting on the sand at my favorite beach in the world, Montaña de Oro, with Star, watching the sun dip into the sea. The waves sizzle like stellar currents as they move back and forth over the shore. Yesterday we drove out to Antelope Valley to watch wildflowers. The entire valley was vacant. I miss the antelopes, I said. Later I read that they had been extirpated from the area since 1900. At night we met up with Fi and walked to the L.A. river, ducked under a fence, and sat under the moon. The night was vast and thin, quiet except for a man who drove his puttering dirt bike back and forth over a nearby pedestrian bridge. Fi opened her bag and revealed tea and teacups, chamomile and moringa, and a bowl of cut apples, blackberries, and cookies. I finished my tea quickly and noticed a small dead spider at the bottom of the cup. I asked Star and Fi what they thought it meant. Before we left Fi presented us each with a stick of incense. Mine was for Amitābha, the Buddha of infinite light. A curious siamese cat hung around us as we said goodbye. Star and I walked to the car and I picked kale from a sidewalk garden, I had no money and I was hungry for the earth. The next morning we left town early and drove north along the sea. The incense had crumbled into pieces in my purse. I burned them on the beach.

the crows

Thousands of crows, crows from all over, gathered after the weather event to strategize. During the night there had been a terrible storm, and when I awoke the sound of rushing winds had been replaced by a different kind of ominous call. I opened my curtains as I did every morning immediately upon waking and saw them, oily black covering every roof, lawn, fence, and power line.

Often when I see an animal, I wonder what it is a sign of. I wondered this now. If this was a symbol, it must be an oceanic one. They spoke to each other all at once, in complex tongues I was too simple to understand. All night I had tumbled through violent, sexual dreams. I awoke multiple times with my fists grasping the headboard, as if in sleep I was afraid of being carried away with the winds that threatened my thin walls.

I picked up my phone and took a photo of the scene. I thought about sending it to someone then remembered I knew no one. How long had I been in this room now? There was no way of being sure. My phone contained no numbers, no texts. I had spent many months, maybe a year, looking out this window, a lone creature in a glass enclosure, occasionally catching glimpses of life outside. Elsewhere life pressed on, but in this room I had barricaded myself so fully inside that even time didn’t dare pass through it.

When I had told Sapphire to leave that day, what I really meant was, if I lose you I will die. She took a long, slow sip of her coffee while gazing out at the passing clouds, then without another word, placed it down on the sill, picked up her jacket, and followed them. There the mug sat, in the exact place she had left it. The coffee had long since evaporated, leaving a sooty film. That residue was the only evidence she had been real. 

I laid back down on the bed now, as I did the day she left. I had laid for a very long time and waited. Today I watched the birds. Their complex web of relationships. I imagined a party with everyone I had ever known in attendance. Sometimes I had dreams like this. All day the black sea outside undulated. The tide never turned. It continued on into the night.

That night in sleep I saw Sapphire’s face gleaming in too-bright sun. I awoke to the sound of my phone, light pressing through the edges of my curtains. I rarely received calls anymore, and when I did, I didn’t pick up. Disoriented from the dream's haze I answered. Sapphire had been in an accident last night. She was dead.

I stood slowly and opened my curtains as I did every morning. The crows were gone. Not a single black feather remained. The entire world outside seemed strangely silent. And the sky—like an eye without an iris. Never in my life had I seen a sky as empty as that one. 

dogs with long claws

After the house burned down

She ran for miles with pencils in her hair

Forgetting the pictures she used draw so vigilantly

Hands with seven fingers, dogs with long claws

Everywhere she went, a trail of old shavings

Now we pass the days luring cats out from under cars

And nights building nests out of tires and sticks

Though the crack in the door I watch her move through dark hallways

Then out into the night, singing:

What once floated

now sinks like a stone