Featured Poetry

Cinematic History

With leer to camera, flourishing his cape,
And twirling fingers at his waxed moustache,
The villain pauses, and then makes his dash
Towards the damsel with her mouth agape.

The screen blacks out a moment for suspense
And in the gap the words “She screams” replace
The awful action. Then that gaping face.
But the only screams are from the audience.

Song of Itself

Shades gather high against the moulded ceiling
And stain the edges of the picture frames
That room by room and down the house-long halls,
From which the summer day is stealing,
Appropriate the walls
With bits of elsewhere verified by names.

The Music of What Happens

It is to this all art aspires,
They say,
When those twin helices, the double gyres
Of form and content turn as one instead,
Until whatever sense they may
Be said to have, though sensed, cannot be said.

And isn’t that what happens here
From day
To day, this fashioning they engineer
Of time through time: the way the air arranges
The sky or makes the treetops sway,
Or washing wrestles with its shadow changes;

The Chorus

That green expanse
Is swaying long and lush beside the creek,
And there his ball’s forgotten as the child,
Unable not to shriek,
Chases the phantoms of the wind that dance
Among the stems and seedheads and runs wild.
And wind-shaped figures seem to turn
Among those willow shadows with concern.

Lining Up for the Tower of Terror

(Disneyworld, 2007)

Grouped by long queues in a windowless basement,
Standing on slab ramps of rigorous, mellow
Gray, between rails sprayed industrial yellow,
Eager and damp as sardines, wait the damned.

because the cut your presence

The Murderess

Prima Donna

All He Whispered: 1981

In high school, everybody beat him up.
Not just the thugs, whose ire he seemed to court,
But even those who weren’t the fighting sort.
Like tiny Pete Maloney, nicknamed Pup,

Who broke his nose. Or shy, sweet Wanda Speers,
Who burst from her chair one morning in Home Ec,
Beat him down to the floor, then kicked his neck.
Neither told what he’d whispered in their ears.

Shades of Tucson: 2005

I have two trees in my front yard. Jesús,
my next-door neighbor, told me yesterday
I ought to cut the chinaberry down:
non-native, he said. The other, a eucalyptus,

was planted fifty years ago by James,
who grew up in this house, though he now lives
across the street, next door to Mrs. Chávez,
whose husband (James once told me) tried to drive