Welcome to poetry sampler. Please support the literary arts by subscribing to old-fashioned print magazines and following poetry on line. I am committed to seeing my work in the world in book form, in journals, and on line. Forthcoming: poetry in Stand Magazine (2020) and in High Plains Register (2019); prose poem in Artists Field Guide to Yellowstone from Trinity University Press (2019) The Figure on the Bus For Leslie Smith, who writes beautiful songs
I used to be that figure on the bus, the one who hated the four rides two each way each work-a-day day
of the year. Now I have been turned into The Mom, the one who is expected to hand out compliments, and, as necessary,
The Look. Often the same young woman sits beside me. Buds to ears, she sings perhaps only for herself, but I like to think for all of us,
a beautiful voice making me feel not so old, or perhaps, because like the driver who takes his time to close the doors behind us, we are tired
of the slow rush of things, and so little more than the words hello goodbye hello can lift us both dawn and dusk. We lean into what ordinary grace
we find: a cityscape streaked and smudged, bus windows fractaled by sleet and rain, the flash, the pulse of artificial lights carrying us home;
the haggard faced young man who never gets on or off; those two hatless girls shouldered together whispering into book bags; all of us without name
tags or the address cards parents once pinned to our jackets because they knew we would be lost. Is it enough now that I watch out for all of them?
--Appeared in Stand magazine, volume 16(2) 2018 The Reliquary
I am thief to the green stalked sage, sun-scented tassels worthies burned to smudge inside air clean or sneak into another kitchen wreath.
I am thief to goldenrod fall dry buds, their old greenness I pinch, a fool to think this talisman will hold off yellow jackets. The afternoon will not miss their urgency but know what has been taken: the goldeneye's dull brown center that petal curl twisting inward like paper once used early mornings to light the trailer's oil stove, my family still sleeping. Of these I construct a reliquary, the moments that won't leave me behind.
The flat black round stone I move further along the beached bone: a dead-fall tree twisted around its older self. Its mossy pockets I leave to the ants and small spiders, the eggs never more than eggs.
A sudden scratchy scatter of sound from the shadows beneath the spruce and pine stops me, a thought of what might be urges me to the thief's caution but there! only that pair of squirrels running. Call it play. Call it work.
I am thief even of dust the stone that is not a stone the scarab that is not glazed amber but only the polished scat of what I do not know. I set it beside the path a leaving for the ants the pine needles and snow. Later I wash my hands. --Appeared in Whiskey Mountain, 2017 The Slow Road Home
1.
Cousin Karen's Mason jar glimmered and jangled pyrite nuggets, prismatic quartz she claimed panned from midnight gravel, street gutters after the flash of rain. Everything looked like gold that summer, James and I slipping, side-stepping the hills above Last Chance Gulch. Awkward adolescents, brother and sister, hell bent to find the lost mine, the mother lode missed.
Our sneaker toes nudged the rusted spikes, ruined boards, danger signs trapped by the years, gone-to-seed Canada thistle. Rattlesnakes crackled the sere grass. Grasshoppers scattered castanets of alarm. They fell in heaps. Sometimes we crushed them.
Behind us wings flapped and hissed. We screamed and jumped. When I say jump, only ask how high. My father's words tailed us.
We carried long sticks, tucked our pants into tube socks.
2.
A Greyhound was carrying us the slow road home to Seattle. My father had tanked up his baby blue Dodge the opposite direction. The Dakotas, the crescent of missile silos. Gone wild, you and your brother. Nothing we said ever changed his mind. You'd think we'd been doing something worse than bare-ass swimming with our cousin and her friends at the gravel pit pond, flashing boobs and dongs at the distant lights.
Your mother. Nothing to be done for it. Nothing about not finding work. Nothing about the hell of child support. In this country somebody's always been rushing to be off. Down the road. Out of what they think the best forgotten life. The smell of weed my father never caught.
The truck-stop asphalt glittered with late day eastern Washington sun. My brother nowhere to be seen, the driver determined to stick to a schedule. Hydraulic swish. The bus door snapped and latched. Low gears rattled. Exhausted diesel fumes fell to the ground. James swung out slow motion free of the cafe's doors. The Swedish girls, the black guy from Tennessee windmilling arms to keep up, waving bottles of Coca-Cola, bags of fries and donuts, the only prayers they had flagging down the dust-devil wind.
My Great Aunt Learned
to live without children great aunt Anita threw away her glasses seven years without man or meat a drought of laughter
in sleep she had no dreams
her nephew's children listened for her snores and silences filled the trailer walls with conspiracy— imaginings, things they thought they heard their parents say and outright lies
what meager comfort she tried on they laughed away— serpent beliefs stone crosses orange pekoe tea leaf turnings chiropractic vitamins
every day she buttoned up the same black dress shaved her face locked the jewelry box wrapped a key in fretted cloth the third tit that wormed her heart a moth without wings --Appeared in Owen Wister Review, Fall 2015
The White Horse
If the white horse had arrived one moment sooner, one moment later, it would have arisen just the same—left flank, head, shoulders and mane, single eyed, unblemished or blemished—and just the same, if it had been another horse altogether, say, appaloosa gray, galloping to beat the thunderheads transforming the stubborn day, here on the Wind River Indian Reservation, here at this very corner, here on this very bridge, here in Wyoming, here, where what we say and think on any particular 65-mile-per-hour highway—that, of course, we drive faster than the posted limit—the painted lines retracting one no-account place from the next, and it would not have mattered, whether the white horse’s quick-twitch body had swept out of the willow bottom, whether its white hide had not been flayed to the car’s grill or across the asphalt’s hard canvas, whether the Shoshones chasing the white horse had been drinking or not, this slow suddenness stopping us would not have mattered—akin as it is to counting coup, loss and death—and still.
*
What it is that cannot be said about the one-way mirror that lies between you and the reservation when you report the accident: that you looked into the glass with just the right angle and saw moments being passed like notes between classmates who once threw darts at your adolescent and pimpled face, at what was unfashionable about your dress, hem safety-pinned or scotch-taped, making you wish you were someone somewhere else, instead you were white-skinned and extraneous here as well—the language being spoken though the words sounded the same, that when later you asked for it, the report, as nonexistent as the BIA cop who'd investigated the scene and carefully filled a yellow ruled legal pad with names and addresses of victims, now nowhere to be found, the cop transferred out of state, that when asked to, you believed the Indians never drunk, the horses harnessed to a 4 am dream, their now-clumsy carcasses never dragged through the tactless grass, and the whole incident confused with an emergency videoed for TV. --Appeared in Northern Lights, 1989
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