As Mourning Doves Persist

Chamomile, tea abate this pang on Christmas ... fragile spoon  a mother in the quicksand belch of carols  ... kisses  through hair ... She said this would make a prayer wall ... clefts where mud  has  washed away

who tends to the old man downstairs, wakes the incontinent dog for a walk; moves one dusty memory to another table, making room for her art. Realize her hula hoop of a dream, moving from anxious waist to ready neck and then back down again. Adapt. Adept. A moving target. Wedded to starving, she laughs at last when we're together  but in the solace of her car is likely to pound glass with the back of her hand, chewing at wrist restraints, planning escape. Her medium is pure black and white against sky; playful juice tumblers for others. No more April fool. Finally she has snuck back into the busy market of farmers, no longer lonely, scouring for basil, tomatoes, and a fist of dahlias big as her bursting thoughts and fragile  as her kiln-fired heart which  when tapped prematurely may tumble  into a ship of splinters, a sturdy raft with bright, rippling pirate's flag. All those necessary trees hitched together. She will be disguised as Ms. Tom Sawyer....

In Antonito, Colorado, stands a two-story beer can castle visible for blocks as you take Main Street, mud and tin, discards of a lapsed warrior who stacks glass and nails hubcaps, banging out his gratitude for survival in battle. We’re told that the maker resides in an adjacent trailer, drinks tea with deities, having sworn off tobacco scored in Binh Ba, Vietnam, and the binge alcohol of potential death. He saws the cans in half and drags them flattened to the backyard, flipped inside out, sculpts icing of sparkling shingles Stark red evil eye swings at the front gate, burning reminder, and our Lady of Guadalupe, mother of God, stands coy in a small birdcage. She is safe here with her head bowed, one innocent outstretched hand under these eerie winter windows curtains torn to expose only black and the menagerie of glass as insulation. These monumental spires resemble grain silos on the horizon, or nose cone capsules separated from their...

She never quite understood her name , while she secretly loved its sound.  Speculated our mother had a dream in which the syllables  fell from a basket  in a scrabble  to   compose  the odd, monkey moniker that stuck.  Only  sister  joined by blood, first friend or pest, and sharer of stories,  witness to  bats  swooping night's swimming pool.  Always there.  With her  loose baby teeth,  grinning.  Hair akimbo as I tugged  and tucked my  cowlicks  under hard, spiky headbands.  T rick or treat tag-along,  sucking on Sweet Tarts,  three TV shows  minimum in the afternoon  as dusk sunk  Dark Shadows.  Gilligan's Island.   Bewitched .  Pot pies for dinner  or sometimes even the coveted poor girls'  waffles, soft,  with red,  seed-pitted jam.

Mississippi river.  A clothesline. Dry arroyo. Parents travel highways away from, down roads named for cowboys, paying tolls. Cadillacs appear on the horizon buried nose down in the ground sporting tiny fins like Martian antenna. We, three innocent bystanders, just tykes in the back seat playing “I spy”, count license plates from all the States. These the snake routes of uprooting, mistakes not really errors just changes on the dance floor as one young mother outgrows her once matched husband, escaping hometown and that mandatory thrust of high school graduation and other milestones, whole generations of expectations. This, instead, the Route 66 of unanticipated divorce. Separately, together, they move toward larger politics, new partners' scents. Prince Albert tobacco and dark lit corner tables for whiskey neat, or the shimmy of a new posture in go-go boots with different promise, shaking martinis in a silver bullet. Train of refer madness to ...

Second grade, we lived on  Cindy Street , cul-de-sac where I rehearsed my confusing life with the usual quilt of friends, freckled, all white, and carrying board games like clubhouse passwords from front yard to back. Risk and Chutes and Ladders.  Cootie catchers. We sucked honeysuckle sap like rare elixir from the bush at the bottom of the street where the school bus stopped for us weekday mornings.  There too at the end of our street was with a pond, muddy with pollywogs mimicking our own growth on squat legs. If you turned right at that corner and kept going there was an coveted destination two blocks farther, a house where three playmates mirrored my own sibling trinity of two girls and a boy and the most exotic mother in the entire neighborhood. This woman with yellow hair was bewitching, had a husband of her own, of course, but she bought holiday gifts for a select share of kids in her periphery, presents that surely unsettled our own mothers...

Saturday afternoon, having returned home, nothing much pressing to do but lie down on the green sheets in fall heat with the ceiling fan switched on. I reach for a book. Just c ome from south side of town, El Dorado , where an 80 year old friend read her poems, restless lullabyes, while outside in the half demolished parking lot construction workers hollered.  Afterwards three of us pulled off for salad, burger, a potent porter in tall cool glass, and Shaker lemon pie - thin granulated citrus slices hidden in crust thick as the aired out top soil after sporadic monsoon. We talked of the mistakes that poets make. Downtown, fiesta . Don Diego, his court, and young unmarried  reina cross the plaza.  I drive the opposite direction, down Old Las Vegas Highway and spy the old ones, abuelas and their granddaughters pulling dark colored cars off to the side of the road, seeking shade. They exit with weathered sticks and flat, sturdy pillows. Together they will squat to sh...

I am the man asleep on the stoops of others, never to return to the warm places inside. Crooked in the morning, thirsty, the river freezes in winter. This is the mortgage of my homelessness. No leisure in this. No romance in nowhere. No shame in the hump of belongings on my back. Man seen and not seen Volcano of a world erupted. from the Shape of Caught Water Red Mountain Press 2013 www.redmountainpress.us

Forest of thin trees not so thin to not hide her. Dips  in the walk needles, soft, Light through feather arms,  likely no more than a man-made block but for this girl, it was Sherwood Forest. Long scream of hawk, wingspan broad. Pausing first at the pond with its pollywogs. Then entering. This limitless place -  not lost, no one  need  find her.  Caps of moss. Hooves far off . Honeysuckle  and her dull duplex  left longing with its barbie dolls  in small  travel cases with  pink  shoes,  always lost.  What grows  here is edible if you can identify. Patches and squares of timeless scruff. Missing  reference, she  names names - shirtless tree, paint can, pokey man, little sister's tease, her mother's favorite  poetry: Dickinson's slant of light.

How to describe the distance I walked for those six days. How I reached inside. What exactly transpired, meeting women who could tune the entire orchestra or craft a snake wrapped around a boy's ankles standing on a precipice, sweating. How to tell that one scholar had dyed a portion of her wispy hair electric blue and that another joined me in the farthest room in the library (always open) and that before she began writing, she laid out her utensils including a chocolate colored fan folded on the flat table. I typed with two fingers on the pad of an iPad inherited from my college bound daughter, evoking sixteen brothers and sisters as if they had just, after 59 years, been handed to me anew as a whole to hold up to the light. Desert light which under my green umbrella on the path brought less unsettling glint to gradually reveal the most frightening parts. Home now, I walk through the house shirtless and with knowledge. Recalling how on free Friday we paused only long enough t...

Having just spent an exceptional week of study and sturdy walks from one end of northern New Mexico's Ghost Ranch property to the next, in the company of more than one hundred women writers at A Room of Her Own (AROHO) retreat, I was introduced to the concept of the hero/heroine's journey with its setting off from a safe, if not full color, home - think Dorothy in Kansas not yet Technicolor; crossing the threshold; dipping into battle or exploration - yellow brick road; witch on a bicycle with monkeys; and rising back up again in the companionship of your posse, then...having prevailed, returning. This is, mind you, an enormously over simplified version of the equation. We struggled, the ten of us in this Master Class, with just what weapons, wounds, and accolades the woman receives in her trek. Given a writing prompt to record my version of the heroine's journey, the poem below is what was generated: (amniocentesis: voyage of perfect delay) Root cellar here or bomb ...

Patsy Cline is singing in the living room while I wash the morning's dishes. My husband is at the computer refashioning his novel. Last night I sat at the table with two other poets, thoughtful women with whom I will read tomorrow in a local bookstore on the acequia in Santa Fe. We practiced tentatively at first with one another. Barbara pretending to look up and out over her glasses at the imaginary. I closing my eyes to gauge the distance between the reader and the song spun out to the songs inside of others. Tania brings her elegant, old world surname which we mark into syllables for proper introduction though, under the influence of two dark beers at that lesson-taking, I am not even entirely sure where I scribbled the phonetic cheat sheet.  Not to worry. We will forget certain things and remember others as we stand to clear our throats and aim to remain calm projecting the humor, our compact stories, and favorite music to those present.  When the cowgirl's nostalgic ...