Poetry

Where you are going
you cannot take
your things leave
in this locker the rivets
at the corners of your blue
jeans

There are so many things a body
can collect into itself
milk of a mother in a cup of coffee

Two Cooper’s hawks on an electric pole, facing
opposite directions. The larger bird hopped up to the 

top as I neared. I stood there until my eyes hurt.
Our eyes must be on loan. When we die, we 

have mercy nothing
prepared my body to lose its
brother nothing prepares a grown man to fall

The tops of the buildings were shorn. So I walked
down Market Street to see if I could find them. 

The fog tried to take my head off. I was so scared on
some parts of Market that I stayed a few feet behind 

In the Sonoran Desert, my brother hands me a revolver. In place of tenderness
he tells me to kill a woodpecker. It’s injured, on its back like a sunbather
thrashing in a gravel bed.

If you like me will you make me better
look at your sandbox of a screen how my
bones have ground fine like my mother’s if
I promise

Every piece in its frame, behind glass, is really two works. There’s the rayograph, its vaporous, everyday shapes drifting across the once light-sensitive paper. And over it, caught in the glass, a spontaneous portrait of the viewer...

What could the social club have done
to be chosen as the first bomb’s target?

What could the shoe shop have done
to be torched to the ground?