Because your lungs are heavy as deadwood
and your eyelids wax and wane, words caught 
in your teeth like a dark art, a snake plant

Let’s imagine your ashes getting peppered 
with marijuana and smoked all night long

Outside the 
courtroom
we wait for
the public 
defenders

Your husband’s ghost wrestles an Iberian Ibex outside your house. He sports three bellies these days, including the two protruding from the sides.

We put a trash bag over his head.
He’s a more acceptable punching bag
when he doesn’t have a face.

I lay my mosquito gnawed neck on the rusty railroad tracks and yank down my tighty-whities.

Ten years of living with Parkinson’s led to a stroke induced coma, brain surgery, half a year of rehabilitation and seriously impaired motor skills.

These winter days
the bedroom mirror reflects Agnes
and my face, hard, mouth tight.

My cat stops covering her shit
at the same time
I stop brushing my teeth.

Her dress.

A first-degree murder of crows perched on skeleton limbs.

documents

discovered

in DC

correct historical

inaccuracies

My Abuelo said, “Pepino Cuevas hits como un burro.”
My Abuelo’s fists were full mugs of lager at the cantina.

My daughter says my mind is sliding
words lost at sea, snagged in seaweed

The surface of a wide river is a cracked door, an open mirror.

Didn’t you see it down there for a moment? Back there

When the beer started tasting skunky, we knew the jig was up. A people that can no longer manage such a staple is beyond hope. The time has come to pack the kettles and seek fairer parts.

Dropping my pennies every Sunday into the offering plate,
I know better than to ask my grandmother
pleather purse clutched close on her lap
if God ever gives anything back.

he was scavenging for an old photograph,

his first wife, alone, a Canadian ferry

During my Lonely Summer, 1999, my cousin Jonathan arrived in Boston from Chicago, and called to tell me his friends’ address where we planned to meet.

After thanking her too profusely for the meal of apples & sesame crackers, he smoked a ceremonial final bowl & blasted “Behind Blue Eyes” through the borrowed headphones

Circle the body’s sad regrets like a Quaker meeting with rose spike gloves