The wind howled through the canyons, collecting debris in its dragon’s tail.  Dead leaves, wood chips, plastic wrappers, and a feather fallen from the breast of a red tail hawk.  The butt of a cigarette glowed in the dark and kissed the Santa Ana as she blew through the brush.  By morning, our town had burned down, and the firefighters had yet to contain the flames.

Could anything grow in the soil that wouldn’t be contaminated with toxins?  Was there a spell to cast, a mantra, an intention that could salvage health once it was lost?  And at what cost?

I stole away like a thief in the night and built a home of clay and stone, hoping the foundation would hold steady on sands that shifted with time.  I planted seeds that would grow a garden I could call mine:  

Novelist.  Singer.  Light-bringer.  Teacher.  Student.  Innovator.  

Too lofty?  Egocentric?  Yeah so what?  Nothing changes or rearranges without a delusional push.  

Sometimes the monsoon watered the wishes embedded beneath the earth; other times, it was up to me alone to ensure their birth.  And I prayed I could commit, for once, to a practice beyond the first virginal shimmer of its conception, beyond the wilted erection, that this would be the exception to the rule that wrote inconsistency into my programming.

I’d make it habitual, like journaling, like brushing my teeth, like making my bed.  I’d nourish and cultivate a new crop of dreams until they grew tall and strong from my desert garden head.

The jazz singer drove to a small town 100 miles from her Big City living.  There was a dive bar on the outskirts of the fringes of civilization and they had karaoke on the outdoor patio every Tuesday night.  She wore a short red wig and square-framed spectacles to disguise the spectacles she made of herself.  

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Nothing between us, I don’t owe a thing to the scorekeepers.  The cards were reshuffled and I plucked a new one from the stack.  The Oracle Sisters conferred over ginger tea and clove cigarettes, their interpretations went over my head.  I felt like a child again, comforted by my own ignorance sans expectation to know a goddamn thing.  Remember that?  When it was okay not to know?
	The sister seers lay my fate upon the surface of a mesquite slab and told me the karmic ties had been cut, I was free to move about the cabin untethered to and from someone else’s baggage.  It was a relatively smooth landing after years of turbulence.  What the fuck does one do with still waters when they’ve grown accustomed to surfing 100-foot waves?
	The sisters said it was time, high time, I learned to float, and to row a boat when the day called for casting a line into the depths, drawing out a big fish in a little pond, right where I belonged.

I’d like to cry from eyes that lead me back to the sea.  Waves crashing against a shore I don’t yet deplore.  And how could I?  
	The barnacles cling to the same rock nonstop because they know there’s nowhere better.  These eyes have seen wetter leaves in forests with no name, green and red to gold and orange, eventually brown on the ground and crisp underfoot.  I was told not to rake them, to leave them for the critters to stay warm and dry within during the yawning winters.  But the snow I shoveled off the freshly paved driveway, scraping loudly beyond sore musculature, is a different story.  My ghost is hosted by that forest when it’s not at the beach, sunning itself transparently beneath a bleached out sky.  
        The barnacles never asked why, never wondered what else was out there, content or determined to stay put, but I am not a barnacle.

There’s a limit to my widespread, far-reaching benevolence.  Boundary crossed by me, unwittingly, until the full moon looms above the railroad and a shuddering sigh shakes my shoulders.  Throwing out a week’s worth of trash, evidence of all I consume gone to waste.  Make haste with the garbage truck that will haul it all away, leaving me with a clean slate.  The city bins, in any town, smell like dog shit and depression.
	A row of breezeblocks rise from my foundation, still low enough to peer over, designed to see through.  But it’s there, this tiny guard, stacking up when I work too hard and need to recharge my battery in near-solitude.
	I shed, with the Buck moon, my old antlers and feel lighter, no longer weighed down by the heavy head that wears the crown.

paper trails, faint as tiptoes through a bank vault
at midnight on christmas eve, tell the tales of money spent
with the frivolity of a child


“bankruptcy” is just a word and numbers are nondescript
snowflakes falling soft as butterfly kisses on razorblade cheekbones
overlooking the pacific ocean from a teak deck in malibu



there are things they don’t teach you in school unless
your parents have the money to make you one of the adults
the rest of us serve obediently and rebelliously,


willingly and resentfully,
and then perhaps you get to learn 
“economics”


I hope I never learn
                                  I hope I go bankrupt
I hope my house gets repossessed
                                  I hope I still love the little things
even when I lose it all

photo of the author by Marielle Cobie in downtown Los Angeles, CA

I’m all out of words.

They dried up on my parched tongue and I crunched their bones between my molars. Dust coated enamel and all I used to say caked onto the facade of a smile that never reached my eyes. Clouds passed overhead and became pink against the blue. The treetops had been struck by lightning during the last monsoon and burn marks were vi…

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In the reverie, she wears a sundress and stands in the doorway of a cabin at the mouth of a forest.  Waiting to greet him, to feel the crush of his mouth upon hers: hot, salty, sweet.  Like his cum, but less pungent.  The mouth of her man tastes like the only home she’s ever known.  His large hands encircle her tiny waist and she feels simultaneously safe and possessed.  He lifts her onto the kitchen counter, made of cob and red tile, and hikes up the skirt of her dress, his hands on her thighs, her palms pressing against his chest.  She feels his heart pounding steadily, skin damp with sweat as his fingers hook into the sides of her lace panties and slide them down her smooth bare legs, over the contours of her pretty feet and painted toes, and she’s unbuckling his belt, unfastening his Levis, yanking them down, guiding him inside her, legs wrapping round his waist, his mouth a heat-seeking missile aiming for her lips, tongue, neck, shoulder, breasts, her heaving cleavage spilling over the balcony of a low-cut neckline, and I don’t know if she cums, I hope so, I know he does, he always does, and then he carries her into the bedroom, gently sets her down on the mattress, strips out of his dusty cowboy clothes, and flops down beside her.
	“I should shower,” he murmurs, his hand on her head, her head on his chest.
	“I like you like this,” she answers, and she does, the animal smell of his armpits enough to send her over the edge of reason.
	They lay like this as the sun sets behind the purple mountains, dipping down as the moon crowns.  She gets up to make supper while he rinses off.  Coyotes yip and howl in the distance, seeming to come closer as the sky grows darker.  Her mind is empty.  Nothing else needs to exist but this.

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my friend named her daughter “demni,”
which means “worthy” in Finnish.

and I thought,

what a great way to start her off on
the right foot, identifying
with her birthright
as a given.

how many times have I kneeled before
imaginary judges, juries, executioners,
appealing to their elevated podiums
like a peasant convicted of a crime

I did not commit.

…

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But the hummingbird didn’t hear her over the whir of his wings. There were important things to do, like siphon nectar from trumpet-like buds simpatico with his beak and long forked tongue.

“You don’t always have to be the one who makes the wind,” …

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To be chosen.

One man doesn’t trust another because the Other tucks his shirt into his pants. Sometimes it’s as simple as that.

And the woman who rarely wears a bra? What is she trying to say? What do her nipples convey, aggressively piercing the fabric of polite society’s veil?

A child in gold s…

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The truth lies in the breaths we take between the nonsense we utter.
	I wrote this line when I was 30 or so and used it to caption an Instagram post. A photo of me sitting in the stairwell of an apartment complex, pointless vanity if not for the poetry. A professional skater incorporated my w…

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