Fortune Telling

Broken open, the fortune cookie says,
There are no short cuts
To any place worth going.

But I have cut many and cut
Short to leave him and him
And her and him
To get here.

The cookie may say,
Many short cuts
Make the path longer.

But I am here all the same,
Cut and brack,
Wild rose and blackberry,
Bramble scarred by sweetness.

Today we don’t brag scars
But salve them.
Make jam.

The long road,
The switchbacks
Go backward
Moving forward.

We know just where this leaves
Us, cancelling the length
Of the path.

2014

Indebted

My world appears solid.
Two decades of educational debt
Prairie rent, propane heat, the weight
Of this generation of apathetic students.
I learn to empty my head, any willing head
The way my sister learned to empty
Herself of self-eating flesh.

The day I told Citibank Rebecca
Was dead, the moneylender, startled, said
We are sorry. Could you please send
Us the certificate of her death?
And that is how it begins. Forgiveness
Of the middle class fantasy of wealth.

Just like that, the hounds she worked for, cried for
Scrimped, and in death’s room wrinkled her brow for
Became a short phone call, a piece of paper
In a file that couldn’t follow or define her
Success in death’s vaultless new world.

2014

Trouble

When Trouble came to visit
he limped into the open mic
with bourbon on his breath,
sweat in his shirt, a broken cane.

He took his seat, made himself
at home, planted long feet.
The room delivered prairie prophecies.
Quiet. White. No one yelled.

A woman took him home,
spread apricot on toast
to make him stay. He did.
And she unzipped that name.

2014

Geshe-la Speaks of Tibetan Geometry

Seven dust particles equal
one louse egg.
Seven louse eggs equal
one barley grain.
Seven barley grains equal
the length
of the thumb’s tip segment.

Twelve thumb tip segments equal
the tip of the elbow to the tip of the pinky—
not quite a cubit. Everyone’s cubit is unique.
Four cubits equal
an arm span.
One arm span equals
your height.

The measurements continue
up to the sun.
Tibetan Geometry
is a huge volume!
This thick!
Scientists don’t believe it.
Ha! Ha! Yes.

Nevertheless, five-hundred human heights equal
how far a conch sound travels.
Eight conch sounds equal
how far we can see, a distance we call paktse.
Eighty-four thousand paktse equal
the size of Mt. Meri, the central mountain.
Our globe is south of there.

Thus begins the Mandala of Universes:
twenty-five up,
twenty-five deep.
These fifty are one thing.
And one-thousand of these one-things
is one-thing:
The first of a thousand universes.

2014
With thanks to Geshe Yungdrung Gyaltsen

Home

The house packed up itself with my own hands.
I chanted mantras just to get me through.
For years I’d dreamed that any other land
would promise more than Brush, but now I knew
the house had commandeered my very arms
and learned to move— itself out of itself—
a dream that leaves a body in alarm.
Boxed books revealed my skin on every shelf.

Once I escaped the little town, the house
lived on as empty rooms of light inside
my mind. I’d close my eyes and try to douse
the ache with inner sky. I’d beg: Abide
in me a little longer, dreaming me.
But home is not a house turned body, see.

2014

New Love at Forty-Two

No babes will don our married faces
or lope about in borrowed limbs.
No lessons how to tie their laces—
no babes will don our married faces.
We’ll never teach them social graces,
watch them sink instead of swim.
No babes will don our married faces
or lope about in borrowed limbs.

2014

Sleepless Triolet

January digs up her dead
And ties their limbs to sticks with string.
Night dances them across my bed.
January digs up her dead—
Keen words I wish we never bred
Pirouette and, tangled, sing.
January digs up her dead
And ties our limbs to sticks with string.

2014

Reverse Galatea

Then, as the singing ceased and the lyre ceased, Down stepped proud Galatea with a sigh:

~Robert Graves

Make love to a poet
(illicitly)
and he will make you
dictionary
(fill lines with light)
pencil scrawl
(prop the sculpture)
pedestal
(sisters all)
his résumé.
You will be put on
display.
No one need know
your name
once you become
a dozen poems.
Try to walk
off the page.
Be a screen
he reads
while his life eats
oatmeal.
Your poems meet
secretly
to pound each other smooth.
Galatea’s mouth
spills his sea
without you—
a wary diction.

Dear Emmett Till,

They might
tell me
you’re not mine
to mourn—
white mother
of a white

fourteen year old son,

but sometimes
I hear your
bright whistle
in my lover’s
sweet brown eyes,
and, rivered,

everyone dies.

2014

Western Horizon

Beyond this kitchen window—you,
prairie horizon, palest blue lifted over
bleached yellow, choked to white winter,
some wrecked fence a black sentence
poorly punctuating half the distance,
like last year’s poorly executed painting
done with a knife, an abstract prophecy
of my new townless home.
Old thoughts leach through
January’s cold pane to you.

I cannot choose a favorite light.
Daybreak buttering your dark toast.
White noon eating you for lunch.
The bold day spilling her bourbon on your lap.
A family of moons crawling over you.
Light takes you on your own terms, turning.
Like you, I turn toward, into, away from it.

Your distant non-line, a silent line.
The north wind carries a message to us both.
But you have nothing to say
on the occasional truck’s parallel groan,
the drips dishes drop,
the refrigerator’s rolling hum.
So, I talk to myself.

Where do you begin as I move toward you?
Do you count cows too?
How small am I from there?
Whom do you prefer?
Wyoming tumbleweed?
Goldfinch gleaning twisted thistle bones?
Me, a gaze above the sink?

Erased.
A blip cleaned out.
A washed dream.

How small am I from there?
How small am I from there?
How small am I from there?

2014