my mother writes in her journal under the heading: How did Grandpa pop the question?

we split a tuna melt and some
coffees at a truck stop just by the
exit with four-dollar coin-op showers and a

Alien, you are the best person I have met/not the strongest but the best/The worst thing you ever did I made you do

We’re on the phone      both of us
peel       ing apples
cut       ting out the bruises

your first
time was beneath

cherry blossoms
queen anne’s

lace & purple
thistle freshly

He sits shotgun in the car

he’d sold to Maris for a dollar

while she drives him to the hospital.

It’s springtime.

even pre-prepandemic, we were bubbled: Netflix- & Amazon sealed: pixelated miniscule-screen freeze-frames: air encircled in  plastic air bubbles with a tiny black box at the bottom:

dear Palindrome, fuck// dear Parkinson’s,// Dianne is in the hospital again// we are sitting on her dog, Sam// before she was taken away she walked over and gifted me one of those grippers my old man used to keep on his dashboard//

Postmarked in Santa Fe:

the sky is electric blue with quiet 

clouds banked against the endless

mountains.

On a finger

of continent between golden, earth

-laden waters, where sunset is brighter even

than L.A. and the Huang Hue never stops

We, brothers, were but boom-swings

born of unnamed storms—eighty-eight

knot gales that tested Mother’s savvy.

To write about suffering you need a dictionary.

You don’t have one, but you have the internet which is, maybe, better for suffering.

Accidentally, you look up suffrutescent instead.

Most of the people in the restaurant

have cancer. The waitresses have been hired

to float their soft palms across scalps

Perched in the branches

of the avocado tree, the chickens

are almost asleep. My son

lifts his head from my chest

tomorrow we will meet the horses/ after they have run the fields cantered around us /nudged /

this is not a war poem/

Each birth brings the body closer to death: a birthing body splits like rot, equal in burden to falling trees. Its weight: almost leafless.  There is nothing left except a tree in decline,

When she writes, Ya need dogs for company,

I almost feel as if I need to own one.

As a child, I could tame any rambunctious pup, wild cat,

When my hand finally braves the wilderness
between my legs, I find its oasis gone

—dry, a desert, and despite the distant thundering
inside me, no rain will fall upon this dry earth.

I have basil bursting
bodies emerging
garlic signaling the underground life has life left
tomato vines straining

Brooklyn, you were a hot mouth of wolf-
hunger. Those nights, you ate me whole,

ribs & everything, then spit out
an acidic sunrise–orange

Every year she kills it, the orchid.
I take comfort in this ritual, a riot
of purple starved to bones. Sweet
is the inevitability of her neglect.

If I spent every daybreak on this balcony,
the man walking three pugs would become ritual

in the way I once knew the schedule of a fox
who crossed the bay window on mornings snow

Beyond the sanctuary and teachers’ barrio
where your brothers are building roads,

I picked guayabas with our children
who had never tasted that fruit.