Early in the morning, on the train, you
think you have seen me before. Maybe
I’m that Spanish girl that lived in that
lonely house on the cul-de-sac. The one
with the yellow hair & extinguished heart.
You remember my firecracker eyes caked
in mascara & carbon monoxide, how all of
the boys used to howl when I walked by.

You look at me again, the story of my life
emerging from the dark circles under my
eyes. Yes, that’s it. You can almost remember
how I thought I found God sitting on a white
steeple, a brief moment in my life. The way my
blue jeans hugged my 16-year-old hips & curled
women’s lips, all at the same time.

It’s all coming back to you: my dead mother,
& my father – absence is a death too. How you
yearned, tossed & turned, to hold me & be my
sweaty, teenage lover. You remember that time
you tried to speak to me, but I was lost between
the lines of a book, swallowing words with my
eyes: chomp, chomp.

You remember how I left that small town,
a flash of yellow hair, a suitcase in the dark,
along with all my bones, starving for a ghost’s love.

You take another look, push down the lump
in your throat & I don’t seem that familiar anymore.

Published by Cardiff Review

When I was 12, you asked me my favourite colour-
Black, I said, Like my soul.
You laughed,
because you were yellow
and wise like the feather pen you bought me.
To write yellow poetry, you said,
your eyes green and proud,

and so I wrote.

I wrote about the yellow icing
glazed on those cupcakes
we made so long ago.
And the yellow cotton towel
you used to wrap me up in.
Then I took a photograph of your yellow hair - the sun's glare
reflecting off it

Until, cancer stripped it away
and left it in a yellow mess on the floor.
Then you understood why the cupcakes
turned to metal in your mouth and
why I plucked the feathers from my pen
as you lay paralyzed, unable to stop me
-feathers around us, floating too damn softly. 

And when I stood naked, 
a towel less child
without-
a mother's womb
you could no longer speak-
your yellow words stolen, floating
through and through
the cold hospital room.

Pretend we’re in Paris, I whispered
in your ear, when the feeding tube
was not enough to keep you alive.
We are now walking into the Louvre.
And I knew you were standing in front
of the Mona Lisa
when you smiled - 

But you did not laugh
Because you knew-
I would never be yellow
and neither would you.

I am bound to her by blood,
this madwoman of a city
with eyes that see,
a comatose heart, with no feeling.

One, two, three hundred,
a thousand —
we are all carbon copies
of her silicone breasts, collagen cheeks
teeth bleached whiter
than the pearls we adorn ourselves with.

I was a child
when I left this madwoman,
mother of my younger years.
I left her
drinking cuba libres,
stirring ice with her finger,
her nails crimson red.

I said, “Goodbye, I am leaving you.”
She turned her face back to the barrio
and said, “Adios, Muchacha.”

Years later, I look back on my youth.
I remember her as
the mother I lost,
the sister I never had,
the woman I was afraid to become.

If only she knew
how easy she was to leave,
how difficult she was to forget.

This man of mine,
tied my tongue to his shoelaces,
he walked miles and miles –
without looking down at me,
my head at his feet.

This man of mine,
washed his dirty sheets,
my body tangled in between –
tumbling round and round,
my foot in my mouth.

Man of Jell-O,
you are simple to make,
easy to eat.

Man of Jell-O,
although cool to the touch,
You
Burn
Me.

Thorpe, England – 2001

Your love was like a train,
rattling down my lonesome tracks,
always homeward-bound.

One, two, three thousand miles,
(you never knew) the countless roads
I paved for you within my heart, (I never
told you) the sparks of steel and aluminum
chambers yearning for those last looks
before you would depart,

—into the star-studded horizon I let you go,
one by one all those streets collapsed within,
loneliness settling like dust beneath my skin,

only when you were entirely gone
did I truly feel it —

and I thought of all the places you
were going, and all the places inside
me where you could have been.


Published by Cathexis Northwest Press

At 21, the Jordan River baptized me,
at last – my mother was exuberant:
her first-born saved from being
young, drunk and beautiful. On the
third day, we swam in the Dead Sea.
I tried to float, but, my doubts weighed
me down and I did not rise. A week later,
I watched my mother kneel in the
Garden of Gethsemane, eyes closed,
head bent in fervent prayer. Afterwards,
we walked Via Dolorosa, her feet blistered
and so we exchanged sandals. I slipped hers
on and swallowed the ominous lump in my
throat. Even then, months before the brain
tumors, and hospital visits, I somehow knew
it was the last time I would walk in her shoes.
And so I walked the Way of Sorrows, missing
her impending absence even as she stood beside
me, as my hair turned white with grief for what
I knew was soon to come. 

I’m an old dusty book
my vertebrae, the binding,
my skin, leather-bound
the cover, my lips, prude,
as a virgin, waiting-
for someone, to pry open,
and read.

For hundreds of years
I have sat on this shelf,
ostracized
tattered
banished
longing to feel the palm
of one’s hand graze my
aged surface,
and liberate me. 

You shook me up like
a jigsaw puzzle, and
scattered my pieces
everywhere,
do not cry for me,
I have rebuilt myself,
like a burned down cathedral,
keeping my stained glass windows
as a memory of who I once was.

3,2,1,0

I'm going backwards in time,
before everything turned
to metal in your mouth,
before your hair fell off
as if we were blowing
    dandelions
before you forgot your name
but remembered your phone's
password: 3,2,10

before you were the worst version of you,
and back to when I was the best version of me.

Her face is like a blank page:
skin powdered by prose,
eyes accented by alliteration,
cheeks stained with stanzas,
lashes curled with couplets,
lips red with rhetoric
and voilà-

she's ready to step out the door,
show the world what she's made of,

but before she does
she reminds herself that
a face is only as beautiful
as the heart it belongs to. 

She sleeps and wakes clothed in red,
her purple-stained pinky pulsing 
to a crescendo of chants

Pa’lante, Pa’lante, Pa’lante Comandante
Onward, Onward, Onward Comandante,
Uh, Ah, he isn’t going anywhere,
Uh, Ah, the day he does is when frogs grow hair

The lights go off in the barrio,
even in her wildest dreams she wears red.

Her tears are not human
they’re made of oil,

she runs and she runs –
like a car, borderline empty
knowing one day soon
she will run
dry

at seventeen our twin eyes met
like passing incandescent headlights
down that gray hallway that
still
haunts
me

 I knew I loved you then, long before I
noticed our identical
yellow-flecked irises,
long before
the back of my head pressed up against the
window of your cobalt Mustang

sometimes my love was so intense
I was afraid if you drove too fast
we would go backwards in time
to a black and white motion picture
with a strange girl and a curly-haired boy
walking past each other down that
lonesome hallway and
not stopping to say, “hello”

On the night of your death
I eat alone, stomach clenched as tight
as the adductor muscles in my scallops,
I prod, and prod, chopsticks in my right
hand, ring on my left.

I go back to the Green Trails days,
the days when we rode in your Jeep
your dark, curly hair blowing in the wind.
And the nights--
curfews looming
over us like storm clouds.

Our hands were not wrinkled then,
they were baby smooth as our faces
when we dressed in blue and walked the
stage that May, waving goodbye to our youth,
waving goodbye to each other.

I walked the bayou that summer,
the blue bonnets near your house
were unusually dull. And when it rained,
your West Point letters came pouring down,
and I thought of you 
( I always thought of you).

We called them the Green Trails Days.
The days before Sam Houston ordered
the bridge across the bayou, if you
were still here, that bridge
would lead me straight to you.

My love, you’re an island,
I will not pass you by.
Together, we’ll drink grass jelly
from cracked coconut shells,
using sticks to write poetry in the sand.
Komodos will watch us,
flicking their pink forked tongues
as you pick me a flower,
the largest in the world,
in full bloom,
with an odor of decaying flesh.
And when days threaten our youth
you will shout out that you
find my crow’s feet sexy,
my gray hair alluring,
my aged mind astute.
We will then laugh because
we are tiny dots,
in a big archipelago,
What more could we be?

You remind me of the Sea.
I, human above waist, fish below,
bathe in the blues of
your eyes, ready for your net
to cast me ashore. My darling,
how deep
your waves submerge me. How
so very deep
this longing is I sink in.

How can a human love
someone as inadequate as I?
Half-mortal, half-creature,
I am not anything apart from
a fable. Bubbles graze the ocean's surface,
my tail skims it like a shark,
yet, I will not rise.
I swim away, my
tears turning into pearls.

Lou's Blues is in the distance,
along with you at shore.
And I, a golden-haired mermaid,
out of the ocean, I will not rise.
I belong, with all the other
mythical pretty things,
at the bottom of the Sea.

For I know, without you,
it is lonely above water,
and darling,
I will not have it any other way.
 

Today, in the safety of noon’s optimism I allowed my thoughts to return to December. Though I never felt her winter, I knew, she was colder than most.

Children built snowmen, from my window, I watched carrots that once served as noses, sinking in sleet. December’s evenings brought Uncles, Aunts, Cousins, Friends. They all came to say hello and goodbye. Some hellos were the first in years, their goodbyes, surely, the last.

And when dawn arrived, new snowmen were built. Some with twigs as arms, and others, without. Their coal eyes longing for limbs, to move freely, as humans should.

Day by day, I watched snowmen melt, drooping eyes, withering arms and silly scarves.

From my window, I wondered what it would be like, to be rooted in one spot, a mouth full of pebbles, and memories evaporating like snow