Her eyelids close. Her deep lashes touch the
highest part of her cheek & my hips, my
hips are building a thousand
figure eight motions
into a kitchen full of scattered
lavender buds & rugs the color of sandalwood
& eyelids of such delicate souls. Eyelids
that have sixteen small rivers that don’t flow because they're not
rivers, they're skin softer than the milky
My mother only left the house once a week. Friday was her day to stop at the gas station to buy cigarettes while I waited on hot, sticky vinyl seats ‘safely’ nestled behind cracked windows.
As the Braniff International Airways flight banked over the red tile roofs of Asunción, Paraguay, heading north, I dropped my head into both hands. What would America feel like? How would I fit in? I had spent most of my nineteen years in Paraguay, where my parents were Mennonite medical missionaries. Now in August of 1970, I was off to go to school in America, the land of promise and opportunity...
Hot all night and no one can sleep.
I see neighbors on their porches
panting wolf-like at the moon.
It’s even too hot to try a walk.
It’s 1978, air conditioning exists
but not in our ghetto neighborhood.
Fixated on boobs, I sketched my way through Sister Mary Francis’ fourth grade. While the rest of the class was learning how to add triple columns of numbers, I was sketching top-heavy femme fatales baring lots of cleavage.
Domingos En Chile
a slow stoned Sunday stroll
through streets of Neruda’s
stomping grounds.
The house was a living, breathing body. The real estate agent, a man my father’s age and eyes more honest than I had imagined, boasted about the semi-famous author who had lived there before, and the nice swing in the back, and how...
I sat quietly at the Omni Commons in Oakland, CA, biting my nails and shifting my weight in my seat every few minutes. As I waited for the Green Windows monthly writing workshop to begin, I was nervous.