Catch and Release

We wait for it
The writhing hatch to flow
from fresh mouths

Can’t resist
the fleck, wet wings
quilting light

Hit quick
Hunger numbs
the lip to the nick

Thrill the swim
against our own mouth
and every known current

Pulled by unseen line
into someone’s sight, the pool
of a chest, the net

We pray for wet hands
To be inexplicably held
and slide away unscathed

No hand-shaped cloud
tattooed upon
the skin’s egress

2012
featured in Riseforms

April Aubade

When you finally
sleep with the
window open in
a century old

house, the itch
of April enters,
a highway breathes
through, trains woo

darkly westward. Come
morning, wood pecker
drills a hole
into your waking

mind. A pin
of light shines.
Air sucks your
closed door against

its frame, trying
to make a
path through you.
Wood knocks wood.

Your metal mechanism
clicks in its
lock, hinges almost
creak. Everything begs

a thin opening.

featured in The Telluride Watch, April 2011

of breasts and mushrooms

A loose jowled, broad shouldered woman in black
wanders our camp with large handled basket and
pendulous breasts swinging freely beneath peasant blouse
above thin legs. She asks in lilting accent, perhaps French,
“May I have your mushrooms?” as though they were ours
only for camping for a price on a mountain where air hums
with RV generator songs. Admiring her trespass of parceled
campground boundaries, her astute respect for American
habits of possession in a quest for fungal delicacies,
and having enough delighted in their frumpy company peeking
at my pointing children from tiny mosses and pine duff, I say,
“Yes, of course,” and notice her basket nearly full, soil clinging
to creamy sponge roots below dozens of burnt red waxen caps,
echoing her own robust form.  She squats and pulls. Wanders.
Squats and pulls some more, looks up at me, around me,
as I write. I want to walk with her, watch her cook these mysteries
over fire, taste her Rocky Mountain dreams of French cuisine.
I imagine, instead, her crossing into other camps, ambassador, visiting
my rough brothers-in-law, their blonde wives, leaning against red
trucks and silver mini vans, not far from here, through lodge pole pines,
her gentle request, their eyes upon her passing swaying breasts,
crude comments chuckled beneath beer breath,
relieved their own wives’ tits are tucked away,
firmly compressed, hiding their age, padded and wired
from wandering eyes, mushrooms unable to rise,
no nipples greeting the duff of day.

featured in Four Corners Free Press, September 2011

Because my son announces Narnia trees! on his seventh winter solstice

Driving across Nebraska
we are witnessed

by a stand, no, a hundred mile strand,
of wizened iced trees.

From every tip, ominously fragile,
sag shining branched veins of glassed light.

I start to slough my skin,
drop muscles, organs, bones like leaves

reveal my nerves and veins,
stand up solid in the sun,

reaching, sagging,
a branched thing, silent and clear.

featured in A Prairie Journal (Winter 2008)

hymn of three cherries and an apricot

you brought a bowl

of orchard cherries

so black red, so well read,

I blush just remembering how

they crushed and

fled their skins inside my mouth.

for the road I saved three,

and a perfect apricot sun

wrapped in a paper napkin,

but not for me. they sat

in the passenger seat, patiently,

a sweet lopsided quartet,

leaning with me around miles

of mountain curves.

the apricot went first.

(oh yes, I dared my teeth)

velvet cleavage, tart bursting

cousin of peach.

(the cherries, singing, start

to preach: O pit,

a wrinkled prayer!)

I meant to save them

for my kids, I really did.

but none were spared.

one by one, over a day

in two cars and a dim morning

kitchen, I hmmmnned them in,

and in and in.

featured on Center for Integrated Arts website, March 2009

spring forward, fall back: what are you doing with your extra Hour, he asked

She made a melody for lyrics she wrote, graded five essays, and

checked her email too many times for words that didn’t come.

She spoke of and sounded the letter H with her youngest son:

Hen, House, and Horse, of course. And didn’t

tell him of a man’s blue Hallelujah eyes, or his Hands

a fivefold Heaven on her Hips.  Instead, she Helped him circle

a Heart.  She also watched a House burn bright across

the prairie of night with her daughter.  Maybe she used

some of the Hour to pray.  For the inhabitants of the House,

and then for her elder son’s friend whose brain is angry with a Hundred

wires, right eye swollen, waiting for seizures to be incised from his life,

because wily electricity can be sliced off our bodies with scalpels.

She also captured vomit once in a bucket, and as she waited expectantly

for the second batch, she Heard from the son concerned with H’s

that throwing up is Hard.  Yes, it is, Honey, throwing up is Hard.

Later, she Hugged her Husband from behind, with Hidden tears,

as he listened to the song she played him all those years ago.

She remembered she loves him, touched by how he seeks to please her,

letting Hair Hang long down along and around his face like a silken windy

Halo.  In that Hour, she inhaled his neck, still Haunted by Hallelujah.  How?

Can her Heart ever be circled?  Hoping for her boys’ sleep, she read

of a fox tamed by a little prince whose Hair, the color of golden wheat,

made the fox Happy, made him anticipate. Then, as she read in bed, to only

herself, after setting her soothing zen alarm clock for Monday morning, thankful

for the extra Hour of sleep she would be getting, she instructed her daughter

to put a peeled clove of garlic in her Hurting ear, rather than rise, rather than

do it for her.  And she fell asleep unsure of where her extra Hour ended or began.

featured in Blood Lotus, Spring 2008