Poetry

You, leaping from the limestone bluffs of Pueblo Reservoir,

are suspended a moment

with the pelicans, white K-Swiss laces fluttering, red life vest

Mrs. Lucia Rainbow grows the neighborhood’s best begonias for sport.

Bucket at her feet,       spritzer bottle in hand.             Crickets float

across the bucket crest on a cupped leaf, one upright, the other stooped,

As in this conflation of sound causes a parallel of death.
As in the body flattens on concrete. As in the body roasts on tar.
Calves ache from the stillness. The tongue swells, overfilling the mouth.

This is a box step, forward and backward.
Glancing at the appearing town you take a night rush of january air
though it might never be the same

In the woods behind our first house, that picketless patch
of silence where we buried a precious yipper named Pinka,
seven years of christmas trees laid to RIP in the grip of kudzu

My cousins know what they know like loose seeds, like the future
blooms from an archive. We smoke hookah in Patterson and flag
the waiter down with our dim coals, thin smoke, we are a pain
in the ass, walo, we know.

But presently what interests me is my soul.
He’s been absent for weeks. He left one night
when the clouds flamed purple behind the lacy tree,

and usually he loves this type of thing.

My brother says his next tattoo will read Made in China,
even though he wasn’t. He tells people his birth name

is Ching Chong, which is a lie, and that he can’t speak
any language fluently except for English, which is true.