No Question

The tag on the tea bag said
Where there is love, there is no question.

I asked this morning what huge bird
Threw itself against our kitchen window.

No feathered form hunched in gravel.
The window looked like no sky to me.

The bird did not ask about glass,
Just flew full stop, carried itself off
Like a dark question mark.

This morning I did not ask
About your shining eyes.

You opened them.
I flew inside.

2014

The Shell

A mother lost in mothering
Ran by the sea. A small girl, perhaps five,
Ran ahead of her. The brown striped shell,
A triton, lay lodged in the shore.
Wet sand sucked at the shell in her hand,
Pulling. The mother was sure
It was hers, her gift from the sea,
Calling her out of sacrifice like a horn.
“Look what the sea gave me!”
“I saw it first,” claimed the girl.
Blind in the deep layer of motherhood,
Newly photophagic, the woman refused
To hand it over like a good mother would.
The child would have to pout.
For thirteen years, the woman kept
The shell on a shelf, reminder
Of her in-winding self, the empty sea
Of her own ear, and didn’t budge
When her growing daughter yearly
Told her who saw the shell first.
The day the girl left home a woman,
The mother packed the shell in her duffel
Like a prayer she would some day hear.

2014

Tiny Birds

Beaks buried in nectar,
Bodies buddhas,
Wings blur.

We study throats,
Rusty bellies
In books, windows.

My grandmother’s words
Were once full
Of hummingbirds.

Last night, every time
We kissed, one
Burned inside my dark mind.

When the feeder tips,
The tiny bird
Moves with it.

2013

NFSPS Poetry Awards

The National Federation of State Poetry Societies has announced the winners of its 2014 contests. I am pleased to learn that three of my poems were honored:

The Margo Award:"Tiny Birds," third place (out of 167 entries), forthcoming in the 2014 anthology, Encore.
NFSPS Founders Award:"And We Will Bloom," 3rd Honorable Mention (out of 363 entries)
Peace Award:"Practicing English with Geshe-la," 2nd Honorable Mention (out of 138 entries)

A complete list of all winners can be found here.

Practicing English with Geshe-la

Mouths round
to make crown.
Throats and lips thin
to say bliss.
We talk about
meanings,
the differences
between bliss
and blessing,
religious versus
spiritual gifts,
how kind becomes
benevolent.
We consider
the subtle
shift in
dependence
when saying
grant me
instead of show.
The feeling of O.
O sweet prefix
of recognize,
praying
to comprehend
again and again
what is true—
how this sound
is chewed!—
our own true nature
beyond words
where one is both
a pronoun
and a universe.

2012
with thanks to Geshe Yungdrung Gyaltsen

And We Will Bloom

for Sage

I adore you, seed eater,
Spoke Demeter
From afar
To her daughter
Who, laughing,
Ate the whole
Pomegranate
Splatter-handed
In Seattle,
Her new home
Of fog and rain.
And flame.
Forget seasons.
She won’t return—
Hades is no man
Or underworld
But this one,
Where roads steal
And homes burn.
Persephone will enter
With her red-seeded heart,
Her jaws of life,
Her mask,
Her heavy water,
Every breath Demeter
Ever gave her,
And rescue someone else’s
Son or daughter
From a new kind of hell.

2014

When Institution Hijacks a Life

When institution hijacks a life,
The body is ruled by a new gravity.

Organs fall. And fat. Leaner
For the daily front on bed’s edge
Of a windowless dream.

Are you one of the lipsticked ones,
Lilting? Yesterday, pleasant faced,
Did you say something you didn’t mean?

From which pocket do you pay?

Today, we beg the sky
For something unspecific.
We know when it comes.

In the long hallway, a cricket sings
From a crack in the drywall.
It sends us walking.

It doesn’t know
It is lucky.

2014

Cardinal Song

Crushed leaves give me the year he gave me Illinois anew. Not then a walker of woods—except for girlhood dashes to the red barn with fallen hogs long dead in the abandoned yard where we laughed and swung on rope into old straw, I had given up the woods for straight A’s, makeup, church and books. All the while the Sangamon River crept past my life in its slow brown way. Cardinals watched like feathered blood. At fifteen—so late!—my own had finally come. The quiet boy from Florida I loved, who without shame once bought me Kotex tampons, held my hand through Carpenter’s Park. Red birds always a photo before were the thread we pulled to the yellow tree where the boy lay on his back and looked up the trunk. I, a follower, followed strangely. Our four legs splayed like spokes. Beside him, above us, the tree’s black arms were bathed in leaves so much like sun my words split wide, a radial silence, and while I knew the whole earth spun, my heart was a still red hub.

2014
with thanks to c.c.

Who am I Now that I have Forgiven You

For not forgiving me, you who danced
My soiled clothes before my face, the terror
Of sheets shattered by machine gun fire.
I have never tattered so thoroughly, son.
In shreds, my fingers gripped the wheel.
Breath threaded out in gasps.
You shot point blank from the back, your face
In the rear view crushed and wet with rage.
Your brother bowed his head and crumbled
On his lap, his mother stripped before him
Like a stained mattress. There was nothing
I could do but lie there, cold. Curled up like you
Asleep once in my body, I could hardly move.
Only a fly could prod me out of bed. I thought
I had forgiven myself. You raised my dead.
I didn’t want to forgive you. The afternoon
You called, broken, your voice a brick apology,
I cried for every confession I ever laid
Folded like sad stories in your wiry arms,
You who were too young to know when,
Where or how to put them away.

with thanks to Sharon Olds for the title

Your Words

Your words,
Like your children,
Are trying to leave you.

You are misspelling publicly,
Hands covered
In erasing’s word dust.
Wipe them on your pants.

Walk down narrow hallways,
To your fauxwood desk.
Try to read fluorescently.

Take words to another room.
Watch them swim.
Misread with enthusiasm
To strangers.

Dream the back roads home
That fields are mowed of cornwords.
Tractors pile them up for milk to eat.

The book on disk
Hangs sound in air.
Your mind creates a page for font.
One word at a time disappears.

At home, chickens hear
Their namey names and run to you,
In love with singy songs promising seed.
They bite your fingers.

Step over paths of the melon patch
Into crispened hands
Holding cantaloupes, ignored.

Embittered after sweetness,
They fall off vines, a homeless alphabet
You cannot eat
So feed to feathered things.

2014