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Ceilings
From the ceiling
in small living
rooms all over America
comes a quiet pressing
in on our lives. We are
women living alone,
not unhappy.
Reading, perhaps,
or watching TV—a game
show, a talk show, a show
of laughter. We laugh
on the phone with our friends.
Never mind that we dream
of climbing a hill bright
with strange grasses
more often than we
can remember.
Published by Nerve Cowboy, Issue #20, Fall 2005
Those Hills
(Debs Park from the Pasadena Freeway)
One day, she says,
I will climb those hills
because they rise from the city
like shoulders.
See how they nudge the road?
They are zoo animals,
patient and harmless, behind the rope
of the highway.
But I have seen them
brass-back the sun like teenage boys
and cup the moon in their night dress
like your granny.
Pay attention as we come
around the curve. You will see
the muscles of a heart. That
is what hills are to the land.
They can teach you
to teach yourself.
That is why
you must come with me
one day
to climb
those hills.
Brown Trout
These moments.
These sometimes moments
of joy and success, of beauty and surprise.
How embarrassing.
I am so
unaccustomed to good.
Moments of awe
encumber me.
Still,
beginning to see,
they occur and occur.
Perhaps they swim
like young, brown trout.
When the eye and mind
learn to separate fish from water,
suddenly the fish are everywhere.
Accepted for publication by Meridian Anthology
for Vol. V - 2007
Another Self-Help Book
Look. I am a wing of summer
on the green curl of lawn.
I am beginning to open
on my own.
You don't have to read me.
I sit in the lap of your mind—happy
to be here, a comfort, a god,
a guide
to permission, a long lost
folder, a sister. Look,
I have words. You don't
have to read me. It's summer.
The air makes you sleepy.
I wait.
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