Poetry Nook, Volume 5, April 2014

feed me words
from your quicksilver tongue
let them drip
into my dusty throat
and down the chin of longing


gritty life
shape-shifting into desert
thirst unslaked
the sand in my shell mouth
never becoming pearls


by the lamp
of a full Thunder Moon
I wrote this storm
with lightning bolts
dipped in wells of rain


the ripened grain
flattened by grasshoppers and hail
a punished prairie
cowers beneath the sun's closed fist
and we all fall down


silver-zippered river
binding earth's frayed edges
to ocean
we paddle among sea wolves
singing the salted sky


a raining sun
bathes the burning bush
in our garden
scattering embers
into the liquidity of light


layers
of this blue life
winnowed
by the hourglass
my furrows deepen

Poetry Nook, Vol. 4, February 2014

Arctic Aria

(a tanka set)

on the tundra
a caribou river
surging past
my inukshuk arms
carrying the midnight sun

beluga ghosts
undulate beside our boat
sea canaries
and whalebone harps
singing the horizon

seeing
with my snow eyes
opening into
negative spaces between
the ptarmigan and polar bear

blue glacier
calving into the narrows
a bloodless birth
our letting go of progeny
that too soon drift away

aurora
lithesome spirit walker
shimmering
above the taiga
rainbow ribbons in her hair

(note: previously published in LYNX 28.3, October 2013)

Poetry Nook, Volume 3, December 2013

two ravens
how your wings
whispered
when my eyes
became stones

Poetry Nook, Volume 1, September 2013

we lay in heavy dew
on the city boulevard
sky eyes open
sifting aurora's seven veils
through our fingers



in the Valley of Ten Peaks
we walked on clouds
gathering bouquets of wild rain
the first time you said
you loved me



how the mountain's breath
caught and held us
in a shower of meteors
beneath earth's blue umbrella
we splashed in puddles of light



on the night
lightning pinned
my splayed wings
to the charred breast of earth
I became a quivering dragonfly



in the loft
among sweet bales of hay
we sleep
with deer mice nibbling
the chaff of our city dreams



we are cloud-smudged
on a graphite sky
blending and erasing
the sketched lines of our belonging
until this paper life is thin



breathe into me
the fossil memory of moss
breathe into me
the dust of ancient meditations
I arise, a bird



in kettled-tidepool
purple sea stars cling
to ungranted wishes
we scatter the dust of ourselves
into the drowning sea



I unfold my origami self
and swim into a lake of fire
washing my hair in ashes
the crane-legged words
of a thousand burning poems