Category: Poetry

Alive Between the Bands

In a twenty-year temperature inversion

California walks in to me through

the windows of a hot car with no

air conditioning, it’s summer and

the heater is full-blast, it’s a hundred-

degree day, I am younger and California

is cleaner, the engine doesn’t self-

 

eject and it jets out oil all across

the country. This awful air of

ourselves, we have nowhere to . . .

Your Second Shift at the Factory

Once the doors shut behind you,

shift to saving yourself.

Try steam and chest percussions

to chase factory smoke out of

your lungs, you need to be a human

still. Which is hard to do with dioxin,

so get that out too, with ghee.

If it goes as far

as your liver

 

then a long shot is to blast

it by eating dandelion buds.

Also asbestos comes in like

a cloud of unseeable needles . . .

Summer Song

It’s time for agitation against the dark,

for poetry to watch and adore silence―

now it’s no time for hug, kiss, or love.

Last summer when we were far away

I planned a rendezvous by a riverbank―

the warm river having a quiet stream

stirring souls―and to bathe together.

One year already passed, but my plan

hasn’t seen the light, because nature

had probably hatched . . .

Papa’s Scary Talk About COVID-19 and Pollution

Again, Papa drags the TV remote from my little girl,

his grimace listing all the ills of our nowadays children—

true, such headiness didn’t exist even in my own time;

and once they start the territorial dance of Agama agama

I quickly zip my lips and run into the kitchen

before his festering eyes ask how she became a dictator.

 

Mia’s a swashbuckler—I . . .

When the Haze Descends

When the haze descends

upon this sun-speared land, already wet

with sweat and tropical rain, clouds are veiled,

and there is smoke

in the air. Everything is a dismal grey.

 

Beneath September’s scented moon

the flames of lanterns link

together like lovers’ hands. Ghosts

let loose for a day, rise

to meet the haze.

 

My heart turns wistful. Longing

for . . .

on the nuclear porch,

asphalt in our sinuses,

sipping what we cannot

swallow. ghosts announce themselves:

the Tings, family of five.

youngest daughter likes watching

songbirds in her pleated skirt.

it’s not about pity, but some kind of

justice. parents do factory work, pipe thickets

to meet our needs until

the accident that is

no accident. it’s a feature, the inevitable

explosion . . .

Victor St.

I remember my first death

under dim lights. A smear of fur

and utter dark on the asphalt,

life stretched and flattened onto the killing plane

described by a singular yellow lamp of

suburban wrongness. I snapped

my neck away, blood-phantom-shard-pain

of seeing something terrible in the sublime.

oof, roadkill, my father said, as if we

should be described by how . . .

Dark Waters

They never tell you how brown flood water is,

like thin gravy overflowing a plate;

 

that it’s cold, that it smells like mildew—

or how heavy it is,

as you struggle to push

the car door open against the press of it,

the angry river like a giant

leaning against the car’s side,

that if you do,

the water will sweep in, curling cold

against your legs in seconds.

  . . .