lightning strikes splits me open ozone sharp and
pungent filling the skies before thunder can do its
tepid heralding my favorite view out a window is
a grey expanse ripped open by electric lavender
knives but i had never imagined the atoms
their trembling after vibrating with exothermic
pangs begging to turn back but this is all there is
the mean bifurcation of a trunk and janus with head
turned not looking into the past but gaze palsied
rooted to the present burning foliage or to future
growth yes even from the charred remains tiny
rootlets spring upwards feeding and reveling
with no sense of decorum at all this is what
happens when the tree falls in the wood
with no one there to bear witness no one to
weep just mundanity crawling along like an infant
– a a khaliq
Author’s Note: A morning lightning storm is one of my favorite kinds of weather, as destructive as it is by its very nature.…
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In Texas,
They declared a heartbeat alone
enough life to preserve.
I watch my baby girl
Suspended in darkness,
her heart barely blipping at 120 bpm.
She has a tail, paddles for hands and stumps for feet,
two dark spots where eyes will be
and a spinal column.
No head, no brain, nowhere near human,
but a heartbeat pulsing through the womb
I waited my whole life to hear.
In Elizabeth City,
They declared a grown man,
not worth saving.
He had a heartbeat,
and 10 kids, and a spouse, and
four decades of HIStory.
And two hands on the wheel.
The thunder in his chest
pounding in the darkness
until
he was aborted
by people who promised to protect
and serve him.
No more waiting.…
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You came to us
with your cataracted mother –
matching duo in a stippled
vertical lattice of black and grey
after a thunderstorm
in a swollen sodden summer
Ears bigger than ghosts
big as wolves hearing the horizon
perched radar on a rail of a body
that has to fatten up to honor them
Rick you should see how he has
made the upside-down envy
gravity and how he asks questions
with a peek through laced leaves
He sleeps in a planted pot camouflaged
indigenous on our sun warmed patio
or in woolen knitted hollowed hole
He would have played with you
In a whirling game of fast
varsity gymnastics
he would have walked on your chest
and purred
In your last bed or your first
Pick up a stick with feathers
my brother, past the place
where the owl inhabits
night
He is a creature of freedom
as you are now, finally
from a boulder of debt and breathing
wait until she carves his face in a
pumpkin
when snow comes
falling with the last
mandarin maple
keep him safe
in those thickets
of cattails
– Roy Akiyamo…
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My limbs are electric,
reaching, clinging, wanting
wanton for the press of
her foreign flesh.
As much as I had feared
my desire was a raw nerve,
feeling pleasure and pain
indistinguishable.
After,
our limbs twisted together in fraught knots,
exhausted.
Exhausted of the wait,
exhausted of the fight to stay apart,
magnets calling for each other
from opposite poles, finally
collapsed on each other.
Exhausted from the wicked curiosity
of being unknown to each other,
of hiding, not lying, but
not telling the truth.
And we are swiftly boated by sleep
that refuses to abstain any longer.…
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Clad in homespun in summer
or her husband’s thick red and black plaid shirt
in winter, two hours before dusk each day
she crosses from cottage to tower. Joined
by the dog they slowly ascend the spiral staircase
pausing on landings to honor arthritic joints.
Entering the lantern room
she checks the kerosene supply, trims the wick,
then polishes lenses and each window
as if they were fine crystal. On foggy days
she turns on the diaphone,
audible companion to the light
lest its beacon prove inadequate in the haze.…
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for Laura Savini and Jimmy Webb
On this day,
with the side glance
of a reluctant sun,
We have emerged
from the cold-snowy
backdoor of March.
The granite garrison,
armed with the
stuttering teeth of rakes,
Gathers the debris shed by
trees twisted and bent in
callous northwest winds.…
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Everyone called Cynthia, our church camp counselor,
Cinders even before she burned
my pink bikini in a big trash barrel
because I’d “left it lying on the bathroom floor.”
Branding me a rule breaker,
she slid her smoldering eyes my way
during our moonlit devotionals by the lake.
Those same eyes glowed with adoration
and envy when the boys’ counselor,
Donnie, led us all in my namesake song.
She snuffed out any spark of joy
lingering down in my heart.
I quit the church of my youth years ago—
misogyny was my reason.
I heard Cinders stayed,
married a man like Donnie,
a preacher who spews vitriol
about women keeping quiet in church.
Sometimes I imagine Cinders,
listening in a pew up front,
her gray eyes glistening with tears
necessary to dampen any scintilla of her fiery self.…
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