Things an Angel Wouldn’t Do:
Bite hangnails
Wear mascara
Leave the gas on
Get a root canal
Things an Angel Wouldn’t Need:
Frequent flyer miles
Floss
Tutus
Tampons
Pepto bismol
Writings in the Raw
Things an Angel Wouldn’t Do:
Bite hangnails
Wear mascara
Leave the gas on
Get a root canal
Things an Angel Wouldn’t Need:
Frequent flyer miles
Floss
Tutus
Tampons
Pepto bismol
Peace/Piece
My great-grandparents were Zionists.
In
full of God. We rarely met Arabs.
At war protests, students wear
FREE PALESTINE t-shirts.
I feel full, empty of God.
Blossom
I didn’t recognize his voice at first.
“Happy birthday,” he said.
I heard
felt the cobbles beneath our
feet the one day we held hands.
My birthday is one week exactly
from the anniversary of his dad’s death.
Every time he speaks I have synesthesia—
see the
smell sunburn and sweet sweat of late afternoon,
hear Dave Matthews, oar slap on water,
feel finger on s pine. The day we kissed
he planted a seed in my chest. I’ve tried but
I’ve never managed to block the sun.
First-Rate First Grade
Welcome to the
Try the macaroni
Necklaces spiced special today
Your maitre-d Tony
Will candlelight your card table
Tulips arranged as stars
Harmonize fairy tale fable
Of skyscrapers and cars
Today’s appetizers goldfish
Oscar Meyer wiener
Watch out for Mabel-she’s meaner
Than an ungreased George Foreman grill
Sizzling fat through fractions
Monopoly dough on the till
Do we have your satisfaction?
Ignore Susie the sobbing chef
Step over the spilled juice
Hank serenades though he’s tone-deaf
Teacher towers like Zeus
Sit back, relax, put up your feet
Eat up before it’s cold
For service that cannot be beat
Just ask a six year old.
Saralee’s Waltz
Every morning she resumes her love affair
with the piano lounging on the sleeping rug
as the light slips in beyond the highest stair
one arthritic palm dangles mid air
the piano holds its breath as flesh meets key
skating along the surface to an internal melody
Fingers play hopscotch across the piano
rewinding jump ropes from a
ten siblings crowded one bathroom in 1929
twelve dollar piano paid in monthly installments
She got a scholarship to Julliard in World War Two
The only musician with long hair and eyelashes
Raised two daughters and a farm read Marx Hallelu
Jah to the god she never believed existed after all
Where was he when her brothers were black listed
Morning rises on
Her eyes decode the piano’s DNA, see beyond it,
Forgets McCarthy, forgets McNamara,
Sees below the bass, exposes the music raw
Filleting it, splaying its flesh on ivory.
Her fingers bleed on the keys and
She grows younger with every chord.
Tiffany
She was mummifying Barbies
the day I met her,
singing softly to herself,
burying platinum bodies in earth.
I sat under the crabapple tree,
crabapples falling in an uneven halo.
The first time she invited me to her house,
we dressed up like Laura Ingalls Wilder
in petticoats and tiaras.
One summer we found a cocoon in anise wood.
Budding biologists, we beat the sunset home,
emptied a liter of Coca-Cola,
inserted the leafy branch inside,
constructed the caterpillar’s castle,
o
Embalmed dolls brushed aside,
we moved instead to fill the inanimate with life.
The orange butterfly cast off her coat days later.
We took her out to the anise field and watched
in awe as she flew out to Laura’s prairie.
Crabapples fell but did not crush the glowing halo.
Spinning*
Michelle and I are playing tornado
in the backyard when Dad comes home early,
before Mom calls set the table,
and Dad pulls us into his lap.
We giggle because Dad has foxtails stuck
in his socks and a flower pinned under one ear
and Dad is an engineer.
None of this matters once he flips open
his vintage lunchbox,
and inside we don’t see this morning’s
turkey-avocado but a black rabbit
the size of two five-year-old hands.
It eyes four wagging ponytails
and four invading palms
as the tornados are forgotten.
Late afternoon light highlights only
what is still green and what is black,
we race around yelping because
we’ve got new overalls and a
brand new bunny to parade around like
we drew him ourselves,
wishing Teacher would pin him up on the
chalkboard so everyone would know
that he is ours, the world is green,
and still unshaken from our dizzy young orbit.
For the Sun
every night as a child I would stand on the
splinter-strewn balcony and squint my eyes
in search of you
I longed to unhook your yellow curtain
that tied you to the distant hills,
let your precious golds and reds and magentas
pour down enriching color
onto the quilt-stitched fields,
building-studded city streets,
onto each bald and hairy head
every night as a child I was startled
when you eased down that slippery horizon,
locking yourself into the abyss
leaving me alone in the blue-blackness
to discover the moon
I write.
I doodle.
I'm at work on my first book, a collection of linked short stories that follows a community of expatriates living on the southern coast of Spain.
I care about stuff. Like curing type 1 diabetes. And marriage equality. And rights for immigrants. And public radio. And espanol. And Frank O'Hara and Jennifer Egan and Federico Garcia Lorca and Tony Kushner. You know, cool stuff.
I make postcards that are also stories.
Sometimes I read stories and poems out loud.
Sometimes I go to conferences.
You can find my short stories, essays, poems and flash fictio in a variety of places in print and online. If you Google really hard, you might find the two short radio pieces I produced on a badass NPR affiliate in San Francisco.
This is where you can go to find out who I am.