Welcome!

My first published poem appeared in 1992 in the anthology of the Houston Poetry Fest. In 1993 the late Susan Bright of Austin’s Plain View Press invited me to participate in a publication workshop. The result was Layers, a collection of poems by five Austin-area poets. In the intervening years. my poems have appeared in several journals, in four collaborative poetry and art shows, and in Two Southwests, poems from the Southwest of China and the United States. Here I offer a sampling from my published poems: the space below is set to rotate these poems.

Sunday Afternoon with Seurat

Jehovah’s Witness at the door and I
don’t know what to do. Invoke Yoda,

Barbara Eden, Buffalo Bill Cody
in a rhinestone coat and tie? Go ahead

and pray then. Mumble me out of this
vale of tears. Pure distance:

can you get me a minute of that?
I need it clear as Steuben glass.

Killing sin. The carrion will come:
buzzards cooing on the wire, grackles

in the garden, Valentino on the counter
at the overripe tomatoes, bruising

the stillness with mockery. His eye
is on my liver. A balaclavaed gunman

hovers just outside the frame and no one
to warn us, our parasols no proof against

righteousness. The wife is happy
with her bustle, her pet monkey, this pocket

of shade. I stand beside her, unsure. My neck
prickles. I hear the sound of knocking.

Cider Press Review, Volume 9, 2008

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Southern Poetry Review

“Midsummer Morning,” a pantoum, appears in Issue 55:1. I have had the great good fortune of seeing my work in three previous issues of Southern Poetry Review. Reprinted here:

Qué Será, Será

She doesn’t mind the time he spends
in the domino hall downtown, silent
staccato of light and shadow radiating
from fanblades overhead. She listens

to the whir of her Singer, watches
the shimmering needle stitch up yards
of satin the color of ripe plums, muted
voices from “Our Gal Sunday,” its serial quest

for happiness reaching her against
the open-window backdrop of sparrows
in the hackberries, a cow nuzzling
chainlink at the gatepost, honeymoon memory

of blackberry wine on her lips, cool sea breezes
on the balcony of the Casa Ricardo, though beer
is the beverage she shares with Elwood late
afternoons beneath the chinaberry trees out back,

good solid German beer, foam cascading
icy bottles like surf flung up an English cliff
in a poem she memorized in high school, struck
by an emptiness she knew but could not name,

sunless-February counterpoint to a feathered hat,
a pair of patent leather ankle-strap heels
in the window at Lichtenstein’s. She walked
right in and tried them on, risked Elwood’s gloom

and brought them home. This afternoon, while he
plays dominoes in town, she sews a dress for herself,
hums fragments of a Doris Day song from the movie
they saw last week at the Rialto, a voice to match

the open landscape outside her windows: cottonfields
ripening all the way to the creek, thunderheads dark
in the distance, and the sheen of late-afternoon light
against satin rippling toward her Singer’s needle.

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Yellow Jacket Lovesong

Galveston Island, April 2005

Afternoons Augie dabbles on the sleeping
porch, screened sea breezes fingering

a scatter of popsicle sticks, x-acto blades
and glue. The Beach Hotel that burned

is rising from his fingertips. The grand verandas,
their curves, the gingerbread he filigrees—

fire has no claim on these. Tante Frieda’s
in the kitchen beguiling sugar to the smoking

point. She knows just how to wield
the wooden spoon, how low to keep

the flame, Tante Frieda stirring molten
sugar, her mouth full of Vs where Ws

should be: sixty years since the bombers
arrived over Dresden, sixty years to shape

her mouth to the sound of islanders
talking. Her tongue will not bend

to the words, her sweet tooth fluent,
in the taste of hereabouts. Tante

has all the recipes. The stories too. Of flan
from Blanca’s abuela in San Leon, the dark

dark coffee Tante added on her own,
a taste of salvation, she says, remembering

the cold in Leipzig at the end, her American
soldier, the steaming mug he offered thick

with evaporated milk. Burnt sugar cake
she copied down for Augie’s mother,

the recipe translucent with boiled-cream
icing spatters, a tattered reminder of her

grandmother, the Kafeeklatches she reined
over, Liebte Oma, dead in Dresden the day

the tanks rolled into Poland. Oh, and shoo-fly
pie, the alchemy of butter and blackstrap—

sweet-talked the cook at Xander’s Parlor
out of his secret while yellow jackets

hovered at the window screen beside
her sticky plate, mesmerized by molasses.

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A Spill from the Radio Flyer

Lucky fall, the doctor says—a slight cut, the lightest
touch of a clean sharp tip, the eyelid, not the eye.
Nimble fingers, a suture kit will do the trick, a drop

of novocaine trembling at needle’s tip. A scratch—
this word spoken a decade later as if to the boy alone,
Mercutio speaking from a textbook page—a scratch—

immeasurable divide between the cut that grazes
and the one that blinds. That kills. The magic
the boy unreels casting backward, rising each time

unscathed, the scooter beside him, the eyelid
merely perforated. A scratch—in the story he tells
himself. It’s in his name: David, from the Hebrew

for beloved—the boy David, invincible with sling
and stone, sidestepping the javelin, the snares
of a jealous king. But no matter. This world is rife

with sharp points. Somewhere another stumble
is coming, another spilling of blood. But here—
now—he is safe. Stitches pull at the eyelid,

the doctor tying neat little knots along the edges,
fingers smelling of disinfectant, stainless steel,
cigarettes. In the waiting room, the fish tanks burble,

humming a single sustained fluorescent note,
and on the back wall, leaping, a blue marlin,
unblemished, no sign of the lure that hooked him.

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San Pedro River Review

The editors chose a prose poem for 11:1 (Spring 2019), a themed issue on Night. My poem has a long title—”Human After All: Walking Home Late Through the Tenderloin Listening to Daft Punk”
Tobi and Jeff Alfier have published my work in five previous issues:

Newly Weaned Calf. A Farmboy’s Offering.

Sputnik was circling—his Weekly Reader
told him so—a single man-made thing

moving 18,000 miles an hour above
the dome of silence he had learned

to call sky. And birdcalls poked holes
in the morning, and beneath their scissoring

tails, the penned-up calf, its bellows
in blasts to crowd the hours out of patience.

Grain stalks fall beneath a whetted blade,
Sputnik falling, falling through empty cold.

Shoeless, the boy whacks himself in the foot.
He drops the knife, the gathered stalks.

He considers the arrival of blood, of pain,
of the cool at his scalp when the breeze

shifts, the vane atop the windmill turning
stiffly, creaking, pointing elsewhere.

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Lost in the Sonora, Sunset of the Fourth Day

golden shovel on a haiku by Ann Howells

Along the moonlit arroyo, cactus
spines, the bristle of edges, a screech-owl
calling from juniper shadow. Day retreats,
sky a bruise deep
and darkening into
cold, into dream, the sleep of saguaro
prickling at wakefulness. A nest
of lizard eggshells, a lacing of snow.
The escarpment shivers, dusts
the wind with grit, the
fissure scar long healed beneath the glowing yuccas.

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After the Waiting

Winter hovers over the mesa, white
whispering darkly over adobe walls,

mercury dropping, dropping, snow
like dust, like lace upon the branches

of the pines that bend and shift
beyond the window. No stars tonight.

The white of snow is all the light we
have. We. The word arrives by habit,

though no one else is here, the rooms
that kind of quiet, that kind of empty.

My hand at the door, the cold
beckons. Come. This way. And snow

pale as the shrouded moon
crunches beneath my numbing feet,

these moments at the edge of surrender.
Listen. Does the winter whisper just for me?

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Lone Star Desires at the Triple Six:
A Pantoum Bent on Misbehaving

on the coastal plain near Corpus Christi—where Farm to Market Road 666 meets Farm to Market Road 1833

Did he wink in your direction? Sound him out, laughing.
Take a cue stick from the rack on the back wall. Chalk it.
Make small talk. Grin. You don’t know a thing about
this roughneck at the bar. Deliberate: take a deep breath.

Too soon it’s time to drain the dragon. Piss. Buy
a tall one for the roughneck as he turns to you laughing
at the sign behind the bar. Lucifer drinks at the Triple Six.
Make small talk. Grin. He doesn’t know a thing about you.

Drain your longneck. Drop a greenback for another
and let your dragon tame a while, gun-shy
for now. Sag, slacken, slouch. Release will come.
A sign behind the bar: Beer is but a moment’s pleasure.

Feel desire unfurl inside your tension.
Drain this Lone Star. Drop a greenback for another.
The stripes are yours. Smack one into the corner pocket.
Or not. Sag, slacken, slouch. Your turn will come again.

Light a Lucky Strike. Inhale and hold, release.
Watch the smoke unfurling like desire.
Bend and hold your gaze along the sight line:
the stripes are yours. Tap one into the corner pocket.

Swallow. Feel your center warming
as you light his cigarette from yours. Inhale and hold, release
your breath. Circle the table. Surrender:
turn and rest your gaze along the sight line.

One last longneck from the bar. Take a deep, deliberate
swallow. Feel yourself dissolving from the center.
Take your cue stick to the rack on the back wall. Rack it.
Let his words circle yours. Breathe in. And out. Surrender.

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Delta Guitarist and Companions

Calls himself a jive cracker, laughs
obscenely, covets Hennie’s deadly hootch.
Lisavette flirts with him, flutters candy lashes.
Lena serves him crawfish étoufée, a dozen bookies

at her beck and call. She makes the roadies
bathe before they get a gander at her, silken
and destitute as the bloomed-out poppies
vamping in the window box outside

the Tiki Lounge. In morning light it looks
the worse for wear inside: baloney leftovers
un-plated on the oilcloth, scum breeding
in the Falstaff pitcher, Lena’s ocelot asleep at the piano.

By noon, they itch for moonlight, the bayou blue-black,
a match flaring beneath the cypress trees.

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There and Back

We are near waking when we dream we are dreaming.
~ Novalis

Ralph carried a baritone horn in marching band,
its brass tubing a conduit for the breath saved up

inside, his instrument among the piled cases
at the back of the bus, an old bus, worn out shocks,

a two-lane farm-to-market road, destination
Benavidez, Bruni, Mirando City, little towns out

there in the brush, out there somewhere southwest
of Alice and down toward the Rio Grande for

the Friday night game. Football. Its muddled
movements mystified him, scoreboard numbers

spiking in random increments. He turned
to the first chair trumpet once: So, is defense

when our guys have the ball and we’re protecting
the ball from the other team? Already, he wasn’t

listening. Didn’t care. Was here for halftime,
for “March Grandioso” and the ride home, stopping

at a wide spot for food. The band director claimed
Ralph had a hollow leg. Wolfed what he ordered,

scavenged leftovers from plates going cold,
shrimp tails included, crunchy as the best potato chips,

went down smooth with bottled Tartar sauce, iceberg lettuce
doused in Thousand Island, iced tea with sugar and lemon

filling him up for the bus back home, the lulling
dark, voices burbling up out of quiet, the slumped

stillness of sleeping others, little pockets of surrender
muffling the rumble of engine, tires, asphalt. Time

and movement would take this all away, though
he didn’t know it yet, wrapped in darkness, watching

the headlights, the blurry borders of what could be
seen, this little sphere of roadway and bar ditches

and barbed wire fencing, of prickly pear and cenizo
and huisache passing at the margins of vision, then gone.

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Naugatuck River Review

“Self-Portrait with Altar Boy,” chosen as one of twenty finalists in Naugatuck River Review’s 10th Annual Narrative Poetry Contest, appears in the Winter/Spring issue, 2019.
I have work in three previous issues:

Another Kind of Answer

i.
They watch the day’s late sun wash over
the barn wall, the broken eggs. Elwood squats,
Judith and David perched on his knees, his arms enclosing

them. He asks Why? and they say ’Cause.
Again: ’Cause why?       Just ’cause, Daddy.
Even at three and five, they understand what not

to tell their father: that they jumped and clapped
and wiggled each time an egg hit the wall:
’Cause it was fun, Daddy! But he so clearly wants

another kind of answer they forget
as only children who want to please
their father can forget the joy of breaking eggs.

It’s a bigger question for him. He needs
to know why life keeps coming at him.
Drought saps the land he tills, the time

he spends posting checks at the bank
in town to make ends meet. He has a wife,
a second son napping in the house and—

dreaming in the womb—another son, the last.
Let him explain the waste of a dozen eggs
to the simple pleasure of breaking them.

ii.
Elwood can hear his mother laughing, saying
Let it go. Count your blessings. He remembers

how they escaped her strictures, her own
wild toddlers climbing out of their chicken-wire
playpen to rush among the cotton pickers reaching

for the puffs of white that dazzled
them among the swaying leaves.

His mother kept a secret from her sons:
that children can surprise you into rage
so sudden you can only let it loose

as laughter. Sometimes tears had come
first, and she told the story funny after.

But Elwood won’t let himself cry. He is
too spent this afternoon to kindle anger’s
heat, too far gone to feel laughter itching

like a trigger in his throat, Asking why
and why and why is the best he can do.

When cool and shadow merge,
he hikes David to his hip, takes Judith
by the hand, and walks them to the cistern

for a bucket of water. Together, they wash
egg yolk, egg white, eggshell from the wall.

The shadows thick with dusk and dimming
sun, they walk to the house for supper,
sparrows in the hackberries calling them home.

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A Step Beyond Silence

Bandelier National Monument, New Mexico

The rattlesnake dozes in trailside dust—
sinuous diamond-backed mosaic coalescing
from the pattern of fallen leaves like a lizard
materializing out of sunshine and stone.

The trail is wide enough for snake and
hiker, though as I cross the point
where an invisible strike line bisects
the path I am so carefully inscribing, where fangs

would connect with blood and bone,
the part of my brain that can think must
face down the part that whispers Run!

When I return, the rattler curls unmoved
among the leaves and dust. Again I trace
a path just out of reach if he should wake

and strike. Again my ankles feel the current,
a knowledge older than the people
who tended squash and beans along this creek,

who left with just the caves they deepened
in this porous desert rock, the stonework
walls of their houses, their markings
on the canyon walls to tell us of their passing.

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After a Season Without

i.
Evening arrives softly, unevenly, raindrops
syncopating on soaked ground. Candle wicks

hiss in wax-melt, candle flame in muted brass
on the hallway walls, shadows scented

by eucalyptus, lemongrass, ginger,
the almost taste of them at the tongue’s tip.

ii.
Michael Jackson gave his name
to the alley cat fresh out of the rain

crunching kibble on the porch with Blondie,
fluffed out in the color of Fredericksburg peaches

while, dry beneath the eaves, her thyroid slowing
(she’s swallowed her pill), Mollie sleeps

in her bed of leaves, dreaming
of the mockingbird that got away.

iii.
No wine this evening. The gastroenterologist
insists. I have cleaned myself of bum-fluff,

applied aloe to the tender flesh. I make a feast
of hunger, a glass of water. The memory

of mascarpone and butter crumbs will sustain us
during famine. Because an age of drought

is coming. Consult the agave, swollen
with the juices of rain. The snaking camera

yearns for clarity, the landscape
of an empty gut. Die fetten Jahre sind vorbei.

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Pushcart Nominations

San Pedro River Review nominated “After the Waiting” for a Pushcart in 2016.
Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review nominated “Dreaming Orion” for a Pushcart in 2014.

Dreaming Orion

He loved the night sky over Loraine, accent
on both syllables—low rain—loved the taste
of the name in his mouth, the sound of his town-
folk talking. He loved lying flat on his back
that summer, dusk pulsing with crickets, dreaming
the Great Hunter. He knew the story, the bright
stars, Betelgeuse his favorite—shoulder of the giant
he dreamed roping, star of a rodeo that glittered
like Rex Allen’s spangled shirt under banked lights,
his unleashed smile. The boy carried that brightness
home from San Antonio, his daddy driving past
midnight, father and son singing cowboy songs
into the roaring hush. Momma had salmon croquettes
warming for them in the oven, he could taste them
in the sound of salmon with an ell—the mouth-
watering glide of his tongue. He could hear mallets
clicking in the backyard, ice-cream freezers turning
beneath the chinaberries, like slow tires on gravel.
He whispered to himself drifting off, his favorite colors,
the names he had given them—Dragon Fruit for the sun
just over the horizon, Cornsilk for the light that came
after. Others for the day ahead. Mesquite Lace Green.
Sandstone Shade. Cerulean. A color for each room
of the house he imagined for himself, and visible
from his pillow, a photograph of Rex Allen, smiling.

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