Midwestern College Town: Decatur, Illinois

Earth spreads out around its brick proud ivory
towers and old neighborhood mansions, beneath small

box businesses, run-down dusty houses and four factories.
Outside, wide fields and leaning barns. Low white winter

sky over all.  A shaggy earnest student waiter with pizza
shifts foot to foot, sweet eyed, guesses you’re not

from around here anymore, and the proud
father in orange Illini sweatshirt, clapping

at the open mic, turns to you with smiling
eyes, inquiring, tell me where you are

from. His landlocked twang lies low
to earth, a warm midwestern fondling

of words and slow, thoughtfully round
as a brown clay pot waiting to be filled

with your story, eager to fill you with the
rich soil of his bright son’s cornfed dreams.

benign pineal cyst

~for my mother who cannot sleep

I dreamt
I held her head like a baby,
thinking if I spoke gently
she wouldn’t worry she
had lost her body. Bodiless,

she didn’t notice, but I did. She
should be dead, I thought, though skin
had grown across her severed neck,
thin tissue tendersoft as scars,
so calm.  I felt she could live.

Sh, I whispered, brushing hair
back with my palm, kissing
her scented forehead,
It is okay, Mama. You
are okay.  There now.

Her expression a child’s
at the breast, eyes wide
and soft in mine, mouth sounds
making less sense, I talked
and rocked.

She slept.

2009

between sky and ground

up ahead, east,
an isolated rain
cloud bruised
beneath its glowing
white peaks drops
a wash
of ink that doesn’t
touch down, just
floats, like me,
indefinitely

writing haiku on a low wall

Spider seeking light
pounces on my white paper.
I jump, let him write.

Lot’s wives

God has burnt
us down so
many times while
we run screaming
from the flames.
But we are
no phoenix rising
again. We always
turn to watch
the walls fall,
the golden licking
up of sky.
It is done.
We freeze: columns
of salt. Rain
comes, melts away
regret for what
cannot be gotten
back. Earth turns
saline swallowing us.
Years pass before
we grow again:
tall trees some
man will harvest
to build his
city. If only
we would stop
turning to see
turning to grieve
turning to leaves,
perhaps we could
find out who
we could be,
stop following him,
walk quietly away,
while Lot keeps
running, too weary
to stop to
chasten or save.

Tres Leches en El Dia de Los Muertos

~for Rebecca Lynne Kellum Vanega

What I will set out for you, sister, is the cake you never made for your husband.
The recipe you printed wasn’t good. I found it on your desk days after your eyes flashed into death.

Three milk cake, it said.

Probably some gringa’s sorry attempt to recreate her magical Nicaraguan vacation.

Cake after cake I’ve made, searching for what is most luscious, most possibly the taste
that drove your search on the computer that day, months before you knew you were dying.

And they’ve all tasted ok, a bit dry, too coarse, not subtly sweet enough. Until now.

Silvia Barajas Ceja wrote her recipe down, said to have only happy thoughts while we bake, or the cake will be ruined. She has a story to prove it.

And the symmetry of the recipe promised life, promised unities, dualities, trinities, even pentacles of sweetness:

Of course, preheat the oven to the ever alchemical 350 degrees.

In the first bowl, combine what is dry: one cup of flour, one cup of sugar, one tablespoon of baking powder.

In the second, what is wet: the whites of five—yes, five— eggs, one for earth, one for air, one for water, one for fire, and one for mother space. Beat them into white peaks. Into their yolks in another bowl spin two more liquids: a half cup of milk and half-teaspoon of vanilla, liquid incense.

Thoroughly spiral the dry and wet into one, divide them again into two buttered, floured, circular pans. (You will want two. One to eat warm right away and one to chill for three hours. Silvia says it’s better cold. And patience has proven this is so.)

Be sure the oven window is clean because you won’t use a timer.
You will watch the discs rise, golden, done. Pull them from the heat.
Drop them upside down upon two plates.

Puncture the underbellies with countless holes. They wait to receive.

Now, in a third bowl, make a triskele of milk from mothers we’ll never know, and drop your purist snobbery: one 14 ounce can of La Lechera sweetened condensed (Yes, La Lechera. Don’t substitute, says Silvia, and I say, don’t think about the corporate corruption of Nestle. Remember: it will ruin the cake.), one 16 ounce can of Carnation evaporated, and one cup fresh milk—whole, not 2%. Lastly, add a teaspoon of vanilla, to marry the three. Blend them slowly, smoothly.

Lick the spoon. Again. Again. Then pour this cloud over each golden, swallowing sun.

The wet and the dry, again, one.

And I will whip the cream with unmeasured sugar and dollop your wedge and forget the berries as you would. This cake is about milk, after all.

I’ll leave it somewhere you will find it. Where are you?
You have whispered you are the blue in the outlet. I will turn on the light,
leave the cake on the table. This is the one you seek.

Fly into my eyes. We’ll eat.

2010

Walking the Winter Mountain with One Dog

for Andrea Spain

Our bearded neighbor said he saw
boot tracks in snow roving through
our land. He put his foot inside a foot
shaped hole, enlarged it, your small
Vibram sole print, ballet toes behind cold
steel, danced about by canine tracks:

one set, one less than last year.

I wonder if you met January spreading
gentle shepherd remains on land who,
unwary, receives our bodies in blood
and ash. If I were large enough, I would
hold you that way, as liquid or dust,
and let the wind do what it does to us.

2008

In the middle

We’re in the middle of everywhere,
circling something circling something else.
Perhaps this is enlightenment, to be aware
of what we circle, what circles we share.
I circle you. You circle me. Though
our hearts live beyond this thin
dichotomy and laugh at the word “hearts,”
at the small strong muscle it suggests,
at the “s.” We love in between
letters and flesh, where love is best.

2009

What the morning brought

The rooster at the edge of town
beat the alarm to the day
so as I lay there waiting to rise
I traveled shadows across eleven hundred miles
under shoulder pebbles and mountain needles
through black strings of streams, beneath sharp
knives of yucca and the twisted love of endless
Joshua trees, into tarred cracks of L.A. streets
that took me to your door. I thinned myself
against the frame, and slid, upright, wraithlike,
on tip toe through. I found you
in your shadow bed, kissed all the darknesses
buoying your sleep. Into the ear of your dream
I breathed: night makes us into morning,
and pressed my sunrise cheek against your head.

2007

When an eight year old boy sobs

I hate my life one hundred and eight times
on his top bunk, refusing touch,
and mother leaves his side after trying
to lie beside him, and father lifts his head
from folded arms to let her climb down the ladder,
the boy eventually sighs himself to sleep
while the parents lie in bed almost holding each other
in the dark, speaking in bed tones of how to best inhale
suffering and exhale relief. She says she wrinkles
her brow, closes her eyes, hunches, feels red heat
when she breathes in; opens her eyes, softens
her expression, straightens her shoulders, sees
cool green when she breathes out, because
it is the body that remembers before the mind,
the body where suffering lodges like a sliver
of glass in the palm. It won’t work its way out.
He nods. You have to break the skin.

2008