L U M I N A * N O S T R I

 A Poem for Mother Earth Poem for Mother Earth I want to be a mother like Earth. Have a gravitational pull that’s constant,  but also guilt and manipulation free.  I want to shower my creations with abundance and beauty,  but also gift them  the responsibility of stewardship.  I want to embody  all my strength and all my fragility  in every relationship I encounter.  I want to be the heat  from which intention burns, but also where icy fear and cold doubt are dissolved.  Make me a mother like earth, who values variety, imperfection, difference. Who calls each of her children by their real name. Reminds them  they are known,  they belong.

 Picking at Bird Bones In my effort to release my poem's stitch,  I find myself, three articles deep, in the biology of birds. Rather than my compacted stanza,  it's my temples which receive a massage.    Who knew only the most important  remiges feathers (and a couple at the tail)  are ligamented to the bone;   that all the other plumes bloom from what we might call  goose bumps;  fuse from one form into another  all with names that sound like pirates to me... Or that like pirates' long hair, feathers are considered dead structures. Turns out nature's seasons are a barbershop,  the bird's skin a strange kind of sheer.   My other poem still suffers from it's Charlie Horse,  "sinews and pupilla" doesn't have the right ring Yet, I've learned things, and my imagination's shifting...  So there's that. There's always that. 

 Wild Abandon, havoc, limitlessness made mortal. This, I call wild? Today the towhee birds say "No." I study them. Wild, they jitter through tall yellow-green grasses. They rustle under Oak's crunchy brown coat carefully laid out across the forest bed. The towhee bird bodies are made electric by the business of survival. Today I choose to be wild like that. I release all  romantic notions of a more domestic beast. 

  Dear Sarah, I hear your health is failing, or one of your kids is sick. Maybe you have no money, or your life burned down again. A broken bone at long last? Some grave heartbreak, one more time? Maybe the weather is just cold and finds you a little lonely and blowing big puffs of  “Oh, fuck it.” Up toward a gray and indifferent sky.  Whatever the case, I’ve written this song for you. Something to cheer you or at least make you you smile  while you roll your eyes: Remember how today, you took the time to French  press your coffee, use the good creamer, even heated it back up a little sooner than was necessary? Readying yourself to enjoy that first cup? All just to drop the perfect peach mug as you scuttled around that black stool whose  new home is the middle of your kitchen (now that there is ice cream in the freezer). Whatever it is that made you shrug, smile,  deliver breakfast and wipe up the mess… That lives inside you always.  Have the cour...

 A Spoken Word Response to Creativity Is Our Business's National Poetry Month Invitation Hear me perform it here You know, my shadow self she's a mean bitch. Takes no shit. Fights with big ass words and goes for anywhere she can land a hit. I've spent a lot of time  living that line "don't poke the bear." But today the sun is rising in a way that has me thinking no, let's go there. Try as  you might, Shadow, you keep  losing this fight. The larger  you loom, the starker contrast my light. Each huff and puff and protest when you don't get your way,  only deepen the valleys and heighten the ramparts that protect my play. You want this vice, that vice. You're over  there yapping about how worthless I am.  I delight in your deluge, it gives me something against which to take a stand.  I'm not gonna tell you to fuck off, or kick rocks or take a hike.  I'd rather use your hate as compost use it to take my sunflower seeds to new heights. ...

  So Goes the Song of Spring  Wild poppies blaze beyond the windowpane,  Springtime’s bridesmaids, their inner fires lit. Breezes blow cool and welcomed kisses  through every crack in this obtuse barrier.  Shade’s look begs that we stay a little while, lay a little while, let our bodies sing  like birds, together and separate if only for a little while.

When Did Your World Change? Was it the day you uncovered the oldest belief in your heart? That day when you found out it was something gray, covered in lint, left behind the drying machine where all your wet blankets have gone round till they are soft, fuzzy, smell nice so you wrap yourself in them.Did your world change when you realized your oldest belief is godless? That it has no shine? That it's like a film on every rock in your collection adding to their substantial weight?  Or was it after you realized it's what makes your body look like your mother's, it's what keeps you from finishing your book, it's what marched you out of your parents' house into the world and back again, loveless and shaking. Is that when your world change?  No, it was sometime later. One day, I took my courage, my high tolerance for gross, and I reached down and back, behind that same drying machine. I pulled the oldest belief in my heart out, and it was as limp as a lost sock. I was...

Stand Still, World.  Palm to palm, gravity glues us to our sandstone perch.  Green hills pause their swells of promise. A glass sea frames these islands,  catches a cloud at rest mid lonesome pass.   On red toyon berried tree limb, a black phoebe punctuates this "now." In her bead sized eye the sentence ends.  Unbound, we braid our fingers and hold on to the smell of home. 

 On Being Great  Inspired by Dana Gioia and R S Gwynn’s Art of the Short Story Tonight is one of those nights, again. Each biography of this deck of cards ends in illness, poverty, or both.  In the world of “everything works out for me,” where do we file Zora  Neale Hurston? Or Poe, or Cheever— What if the cost of being great is making  yourself sick and losing everything? Do you still do your best, Carver?  Or just move on with your life? 

Sweet Nothings Tonight, in the dark, flanked by two of my kids, I send eight magic words wandering through the gray bunk bars:  “Anything else you want to share about today?”  Their room feels thick and cozy, like pink slippers.  Love buzzes in oscillation with the fans. “When I grow up I want to be like you, Mom.” “Why? How so?” “You’re all positive…and confident, and courageous. You know,  brave.”  .“I am so happy you see me like that.” I say, and think I better write it down while I can. There are four of us, remember? And we are all so quiet now. But like at a sleepover, I can’t resist: “Psst. Hey you up there. Want to know something?” “Yes.”  “When I grow up, I want to be like you.”  “You do?!”  “I do! You are creative,”  “but!”   “kind..”  “Mom!” “Curious. A great problem solver.”   “Mom…”  “ I’ve decided.” “Mom!” all three protest, “but you already ARE grown up.”  “I am?!” I gasp, and then act like the news mak...

  Coffee Shop Composition In every coffee shop around the world there’s a scene like this one: As if boxers in a ring, at one table  a young man debates an old man  about t he politics of their religion, each one slugging their citations from the holy book and a bunch of three-syllable-words.  Across the walkway, (the one which leads to a poet like me), seven old ladies balance (what men call) side-conversations with welcome rituals like spinning plates,  seven bonifide fire throwers. At that table, matching earrings sparkle  pearl-like pixie cuts swivel attention from one side to another with ease.  Both of these tables are colorful in their own way,  and there is only one that really grinds the poet’s gears.  (Poets are assholes that way.) Above all three, though,  in every coffee shop in the world, there is music

  Whatever Somewhere a waterfall  cascades.  Pays no mind to brother deer,  who stoop to slurp her results. Pays no mind to sister moon  who, sometimes, lends a hand  to her sparkle. Pays no mind to uncle owl  who hoots advice on how to do it right, from a distance. Even when wise friend Coyote comes, howls ululations to the sheer force of her, sly-like watches her in a hungry wonder… even then, the waterfall is absolute in her focus— to fall, to fall, to fall with whatever’s she’s got. And when she has nothing, you ask? She waits. She believes. Cascade again? She will.

 DRAWN To draw is to notice, to see the swirl atop the sandstone wall— the one you’ve driven past in a hurry  so many times to get to work. When I draw, I’m sixteen again. Dad’s just lost his job.  Everyone in the house seems  lost too, but me… I listen. The universe comes  to call when I draw,  through the mouth of that older boy the next desk over in math.  When I draw I’m smart enough to shut up and listen. I already have the job, There’s no problem to solve.  “Just draw me!” cries the mountain ridge. “Us too!” The palm trees sway. “¡No nos olviden!” Who knew the street lights speak Spanish?  When I draw I say yes to what is, in detail.  When I draw I know  I never miss a thing

 Saturated (An attempted haibun) A far eastern stretch of the Sonora sizzles,  teams with heat. Everything in the desert is hot to the touch, even the lizards. Then, crash! “Always,” eviscerated.  Blue Bellies mirror darker skies, float  sunny side up in pools of monsoon. 

  LIES Screen time says "Watch  me! I can help!" And then goes and eats all your time  and senses while you, so busy, look.  Boredom says "Run from me! I'm all trouble!" And then quietly reveals secret garden after secret garden, where imagination blooms.

  My Baby I am five years out from that doorway-moment where I am, at once, two beings and not.  There is the threshold where a new voice comes through.  "Let me see her," the voice says. "Don't forget!" An embodied Mercury reminds this Zeus,  "Dave- the curtain," and with an "oh, right."  the lightning bolt is cast.  My eyes drink in the sight of us:                                her, dressed in divine wax,                         ambrosia droplets at her small mouth,                            pink, bead-sized toes; me,                              tied down with surgical garb,                        my insides...

  Lust It feels good to admit it:  I haven’t had it in so long. Like the proverbial creepy old man, My eyes rest on other’s upper lips. My legs wobble on the crest of  a pair of broad shoulders. My nose steals deep inhales of some stranger’s perfumed scent. My fingers imagine themselves wet to trace the tones of your skin. My taste buds, betrayers,  want it all, right now.

  Recall It was around this time yesterday,  under the tin of a more northern sky, the seagull’s call came crashing over our heads, loud and repeating… You’d been gone no more  than ten minutes when I heard it a second time, today. I was under  a gas station’s tin roof. I saw the two gulls call in time loud and repeating, not over my head  and not over the empty space  where yours would be. 

  Not So Secret Prayer Dear Whoever is Around To Listen—  Make me an instrument of your piece; that I can play each note as it’s meant to be played  and nothing more, nothing less. Let my small stones of hope, nope, and love, make it so.