March 2024
Bio Note: I am a poet who was raised in Tracy, California. I hold an MFA in Poetry from Randolph College, a BA in English - Creative Writing from CSU Long Beach, and an AA in English from Butte College. My poems have appeared in HAD, Heavy Feather Review, Inflectionist Review, Kissing Dynamite, and elsewhere.
Power Wheels
To cope in a cow town
that dulls the developing mind,
my sister and I played house in the shed
on days rain seldom halted.
I taught her to cook
plastic eggs over
a flameless pan.
Our crayon-drafted constitution—
dessert for dinner.
Once, we ventured
outside, craning our necks
skyward. Our dad’s cherry tree—
wind marionetting
its branches
into a wave hello.
We snuck out the back gate
to travel slices of town
untouched, buckled
into the toy Corvette,
were off like dirty shirts,
as Dad always said.
The sidewalk shimmered
rainbow approval as we rolled past houses
too naïve to view as foreign stories.
We spent our final stretch
of adulthood on a park bench
watching sun become moon.
We returned home to find our parents sobbing—
convinced we drove straight into danger's
indiscriminate jaw.
Empathy as Vice
My sister’s horrified whimper at the feathered wreck
of a bird whose explosive squawks
brought us to shuffle-dream down our driveway—
its guts, a forever smear
on Linda Street concrete.
Older now, I’ve let a fly take residence
in my apartment—
to grow, ram its gross body
into my eyes—unswatted.
Yet, when the flea-ridden cat meows
at my doorstep, I don’t let her in.
I instead wish for regression
to teenage apathy—the ease of my dismissive wave
when my wrecked sister begged me to help
bury the bird,
to give it a name.
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