The Causes of Cyclone Formation Aren't Well Understood

1

Yes, it’s true: stunted hicks are our only fruit. They follow the yellow bric-a-brac of corn field and orchard, look to wind vanes for brain-heart direction, then tomcat home in sundry shades of redneck.

2

The breeze here gets so sick of us, it spits out true green cumuli, then sets that funnel cake-cloud down and spins it like a Tilt-a-Whirl all over our broke town, sprouting yard sales where none have been before …

3

An oak fought bravely, but died defending its plot. Surviving it are one small girl child, dog, and aunt.

4

What I remember seeing: the twirling gale ate the middles of things, left neat rows of rooftops for blocks and blocks. (Somewhere in all this mess is my baton.)

5

To the cellar! No cellar? Down a basement! No basement? Under stairs! No stairs? In a bathtub! No tub? Find a ditch! No ditch? Tag: you’re a witch!

6

The reason Wizard of Oz works as a film is because so few see midlands as anything but a place for flight, and even a winged grudge monkey has more social cachet than a farmer.

7

A weather man is an elemental wiz. As such, he can do nothing but try to predict what air already knows, then instruct you to use the dead’s shoes to find a way home.

(in Prick of the Spindle)

Tiny Studies (Particle 3)

1. ___  anorexia	a. Islands make mini species.
2. ___  dementia	b. The mind is an isle of small thoughts.
3. ___  insular dwarfism	c. The brain consumes itself and is lighter.

(in Prick of the Spindle)

A Tour of Pompeii's Red Light District

A stone bed complete
with stone pillow

in an office the size
of an outhouse.

Along the top
edge of hall

(where a wall-
paper border

might go) is porn so old
we feel safe

saying "art"
and smiling.

Some men took time
to etch their praise

or customer
service complaint:

Flora gives good head!
Octavia has the clap!

No poems here,
it seems—

this blunt graffiti
all that's left.

No bodies either, now,
just ghastly casts

in vast museums, or
for those who hear

through time and ash:
ghostly gasps.



(in Salamander Winter 2011/2012)

Roadkill on the Path to Salvation

(I selected this post to be featured on my blog’s page at Poetry Blogs.)

I teach Spanish now, and at school that translates:
someone who is good at this one language,
as if I live in a piece of luggage packed
with workaday words and plain phrases,
as if there's a black cloud of vowels and R trills
buzzing around me like malaria mosquitoes,
and no one can see past the swarm. Sometimes I talk
about a good book I'm reading. If it's a novel, my reward
is a smile from the gal with a teaching award
and a look that says, "Good Señora,
keep trying!" If it's poetry, smiles collapse
like small countries to a coup, new topics
queue up. Sometimes English teachers trade
daft looks when I name William
Carlos Williams, then clear off to budget
the yearly author visit. When "poem class"
comes around (also once a year), our Language Arts team
won't let me near. They shut classrooms tight,
pull the dusty sheet off that famous Frost piece,
as if revealing a prize trophy from glory days,
then beat kids with it so hard, most want to take
any road but the one that guy is on.


(in Rattle #36 Winter 2011)

Summer Camp for Sirens

It is here where we learn to deep-freeze Dreamsicles, lift bunks at wrong angles until our spines kneel down inside our backs, and handwrite Thank You cards with one athletic, cursive hand while waving with the limp-wristed other. Our camp uniforms are coveralls covered in flags. We get a new flag for everything we learn. There's even a new flag for learning how to earn a new flag! On holidays we don dress uniforms (called unitards) and dress flags (called drags). Then they teach us the language of eyes, how to ask for help, how to feign. We are taught never to talk about this. Our organs do our talking for us. The mouth of all pain is called the brain. This is where the miracle of early rising happens, and where the shopping cart turns in-law to the artificial heart. Because cars are still the best leg technology we have, the evening staff teach us to wheel-walk on land. The last day they take us to a lake, where we blare and hum at kayaks, milky bottles all around. Then they herd us straight back to camp, let us cry it out.


(from Sixth Finch Fall 2011)

Somewhere a Town

Somewhere a town celebrates by having a giant tomato fight. They bring the tomatoes in trucks and can’t wait to pummel and be pummeled. After the pummeling, they slosh down juicy streets and pose as swimmers in shallow rivers of pulp while sopping journalists snap their pictures. Somewhere else a town celebrates by running away from bulls, or by watching others run away from bulls. Somewhere else a town celebrates by electing representatives to race around sharp-cornered streets on horses at maximum speed. Each horse is named for a different animal. Each animal stands for a different neighborhood. One horse is a giraffe. I know because I have a friend from the giraffe neighborhood. One horse may also be a bull. That horse may be under the impression that he is supposed to be in another town, chasing people. Somewhere else a town celebrates by having an orange fight. This is a more solid than liquid celebration, due to the peels. Liquid celebrations do not often involve large amounts of tomatoes, bulls, horses, giraffes, oranges, or decorum, and thank goodness for that, or we might all be wandering around half limpid, wondering how to throw fruit and run from animals in a polite and professional manner. Somewhere a town of bulls celebrates by springing leaks in people.


(from Puerto del Sol Volume 46 Numbers 1 & 2 Summer 2011)

Abraham, Honestly

“With his own two hands, Abe Lincoln built the log cabin he was born in.”

  —from an American college student’s history paper

Theory 1: Out-of-Body Abe

The ghostly glob of fetal Abraham sneaks out of his mother’s womb at night with architecture on his budding mind speck. In the first two months, the Lincoln bean can barely hold a toothpick, let alone a log, so he darts around his neighbor’s place, plotting floor plans and examining crannies. By month two his heart’s really in it. By mid-trimester he’s using his tail to smooth out the mud mortar of his neighbor’s house. Mudd, he thinks, and feels his very first shiver. By month five he’s chopping thick stripes of wood by the light of his prenatal halo. By month six he’s strapping logs to his unborn back and floating them across miles of undivided Kentucky airspace. By month seven he’s all over the roof like a Christmas specter. By month eight his newly-lit neurons are sparkling up the lawn as he flaps back and forth from womb to hearth, nesting like there’s no state like home, no place like tomorrow.

Theory 2: Born-Again Abe

When you make a house of your heart, no assembly is required, but some laying of the hands may be.

Theory 3: Authorial Abe

Like many Abrahams before him, Lincoln enjoys limited omniscience whenever he writes speeches, treaties, bills, or commandments, and this has begun to affect his mind in mellifluous ways. He often imagines, for example, what it must have been like for his Pa to construct their homestead. How many times had the teenage Lincoln built that same boxy lodge in his mind, amputating trees and sanding them to naked plainness; putting, perhaps, more care into it than his own father had? This fantasy kicks in like a nervous tick when he loses things, and for every log he stacks on his imaginary abode, a windy sigh rushes through the grassy blades of his beard. Since the war began, he’s been adding new rooms that were never there in his youth, and the walls are getting higher, so high that the house is now a tower he must climb and climb.


(from Cutbank 75 Summer 2011)