Official Publications

2006 Fiction – Second Place
The Santa Fe Reporter’s Annual Literary Contest
The Santa Fe Reporter; Volume 33, Issue 51
Santa Fe, NM: 2006

2005 “The Middle-east in the Middle Kingdom” (cultural magazine article)
That’s Guangzhou, August 2005 Issue
Guangzhou, China

Poetry

The Forest (2022)

There is nowhere in the forest that is not forest.
And, when I am in the forest,
There is nothing to tell me I am not I.

When the spring-silent aspen stretches out its talon buds,
And its white downy seeds throng softly against root and curb,
There is nothing urging it: stop.

When the mountain has gathered water, grasping the formless droplets of the sky
In its hands called rain,
And has pooled it in the darkness of itself,
And the forest finds it, siphoning,
And returns it, sweating,
Back to hand that disbursed it,
Tendering gift as gift again,
It closes the felloe of a driving wheel.

When I am in the forest, I sustain a strange, endless thought,
Something undroppable, pregnant,
Kind to the fragile, listening I:
The sound that is
Air against leaf against leaf against air,
Again and again and again.

Haiku (2021)

Hailstorm in late spring:
Rain interrupts its caress,
Pivots on its nails

Two Haiku (2020)

1.
The same music rings
Clean off the bathroom tiles.
This year left no trace.

2.
This bed is too large,
And the one window lets in
Fresh air with old noise.

Untitled (2020)

I dreamed a woman
Told me what it’s like to die.
“After ten minutes,
Eleven, you realize
It’s all over, now. You’re done.
And then you stop wanting sex.”

To me, she’s saying
That life is not a sequence.
It’s a small, spare room,
Left open for us to leave
And enter over and over,
Until, one day, it’s closed.

Sixteen (2015)

Sixteen bean stalks stand in a row.
Storm clouds gather; strong winds blow.
Sixteen hail stones crash to the land.
Vanished is my lover’s hand.

Black are the mountains; red are the streams.
The old mules kick in their restless dreams.
Sixteen lambs born dead in the fold.
Gone is my lover’s hair of gold.

Ravens perch on the empty shed.
Strangers at the doorstep beg for bread.
Sixteen owls emerge from the hay.
Cold are the sheets where my lover lay.

Sixteen stallions burst through the fence.
The roses bloom in violence.
The ice on the eaves still waits to melt.
Thistles now grow where my lover knelt.

Sixteen stars are missing from the sky.
And sixteen pearls are lost in the rye.
Where swallows dived now lions roar.
I cannot bear my name anymore.

Sixteen ghosts descend at night.
Sixteen roosters bow in fright.
The moon’s as eaten as a melon-rind.
Full is the heart that’s left behind.

Impossible (2013)

When you filled the empty space between me
And the dimming candle of the morning,
I could barely discern your smiling face
From the curling tendrils of Madre’s song,
With which I still made a warming shelter.

Though my mind was low and tired with the lost,
Draining taste I had of my slipping self,
I could still muster the daylight surprise
That you, of everyone there, had arrived:
You, the one whose eyes I wanted on me.

I wish I could forgive myself for all
The wanting: the heavy gaze and sad mouth
That made a plaster over your running,
Real pour of love. The wounded man inside
Desires to own what must be always free.

But you came to help me forget all that,
Didn’t you? You came, in the night, alone,
To touch in me what cannot take control;
The part that is low enough to receive
And has no need for stirring or holding.

I had forgotten that I can accept
Love without demanding it in a scream.
I had built my life and cast all my dice
On the improbability of this
Ever happening. I’m glad those dice lost.