Waterboarding

Guayacan branches wisp out of root,
shake fists at the ceiling.
Our bound hands scrape
droughts of time from the wall.
17:00.
We may rain.
Other men drip words vertically
down our throats.
A white telephone rings.
Answer, response.
The interrogator turns a page
and we recant the sun. Blanche
our skin in moonbath. Await
thick droplets, twisted teeth
gnaw at thin cloth.
Questions rain. Like
other men, we pray for a
return.
Our mothers in Quetta.

On Seams, Sonnets, and Leaving

“Sex is one of the nine reasons for reincarnation. The other eight are unimportant.“ Henry Miller, Big Sur and the Oranges of Heironymus Bosch

This place has curled me at the edges-
left me leaf-like and paper thin on darkened
passageways of cathedral trees.
My breath escaped the wind through
pipes of hollow trunks, melodical.

Why does distance from these caving cliffs push
tides of your leaving past my bones
with such precision?

Past the driving rain, the rib-chime sky,
and the white arrowhead of Pico Blanco.
What else could tuck me so
neatly backwards into our cabin bed?

Clanking glasses, that word you loved,
your closet filled with shirts. Yesterday, I collected
chips of wood sloughed off our front porch
under your shoes, forgotten.

I’ve counted mornings.
More nights than the ones we spent together.
Watched whisky drip slowly by the fire
into the casserole dish, swilled over the memory
of your hand racing at the seam of my dress.

Pink nipples, the blue vein of exposed rock.
A kiss that begs you to unlatch the hooks
that bind my body to the world, so we may live
again among roots,
carving sonnets on the bark.

Rocky Creek Landslide

I taught myself to cook from a library book

the week we watched the cliff road slide into the ocean.

Deviled eggs, first. Their soft white insides perverted

with paprika, you laughed at my mayonnaise hands.



The week we watched the cliff road slide into the ocean,

March rain spit in your face at the generator.

It pooled around my fingers, muddy digging for potatoes

in a Big Sur garden planted soon enough before the storm.



Leaves hung heavy with sodden sky at

the grange hall where someone told us

convicts built our impossible road.



Hooked backs hanging in the salted air, their

granite muscles nailed to wooden cribbage.

“Foundations,” you said, for so many leavings.



Convicts together ironed under the majesty of this place

Laying asphalt across roads they never traveled.



We move this thought around on our tongues,

tines of forks pressing well-fed lips,

scraping left overs from our plates to

the onion earth of our compost pile.



We walk slowly through pools of fresh water,

searching down the road

for the silver lights of the construction zone.

And there, beyond the redwoods,

we hear the wind men

skipping rocks across the divide.

Talking About The Distance Between Here and New York

Slivers of who we once were
meet under fingernails of moon on
our first night's pillow.

Concrete signs claim we've arrived.
Perhaps it's easy to mistake our hometown
for some other city.

Long division of two bodies-
belly button suctioned to backbone,
that tiny amber fleck sleeping on your iris.

We count insecurities night to night
because our parents taught us it's best
to forget sheep.

We become vegetarian.
Anemic. Two words shook up in a bottle, tossed
for sea long miles.

Against a fog lined bay we emerge
in latticed day from some frothy half-slumber.

Pressing lips to ridges
on the back of your left wrist, I kiss
corked veins that lead to a switchbacked unknown.

You lace your pockets with glass.

Portola Plaza

I want to write with lilies
spilling out of my mouth.
Full of wind. Curled up under a well-traveled
sweater, dank ends and edges of a fingernail
flipping over each scrawled page.

Shivering in snow-lined pockets,
penning lyrics to him.

What kind of flowers does he like?

As summer springs forth to fall, I call to
winter days, all pumpkin and stew.

Holding each tender bone against my veins, his
imprint presses gently, all vintage vineyard, cold
breath.

Swilling through glass, I live in
seconds. Listen for cotton fluttering. A vericose flow.

I want to call his name into the night
and hear him sing back to me.

Swilling liquid, sure of what to look for,
finding nothing but muddled time.

I was destined for empty bottles.
For thickets of roses grown in wine.

untitled (for t.)

I still taste the night before.

Sentences draped where you
left them: across knees,
on the bedside table, covering
the valley of my breasts.

I want to cup you in
both hands and keep
you in a drawer with collected
fragments of paper. Like scrapbooked
petals, a vineyard rose or
a firefly in a bell jar.

This House

A doorhandle once pushed open
is no longer unbuttoned.

I look through where we lived.

Behind the keyhole, leftover
edges and ledges remain.

Crumbs of bread we ate
together are shoved in corners
by the new tenant's broom.

My hair is lodged between
pipes in the walls of this house,
or sleeping in the tub's mirrored drain.

Your fingerprint lingers on the
oven dial or the wall above
an empty room where our headboard
used to stand.

I'm looking for the things we left, here.
The words.

I'm breathing in the hallways.
In the oil stained garage.
Waiting for your headlights.