Near the end of the fall quarter, my student mentee requests to take a selfie together. She whips out her cell phone, presses her temple against mine, angles her face, widens her eyes, and clicks. That night, she sends me two copies of our photo: th...

In this room between now and then, Before you left and I stayed, Let the atoms shiver in the void Between touch and breath, in The hesitant pause before Our lives crash into the intersection of particulate moments.   And the cat is alive.  ...

ARS POETICA (THE LAST TIME I SAW YOU ALIVE YOU SHOWED ME YOUR NEW POEMS) For Bennett   After: I sit in your backyard with the drafts you left I can’t make out, your dog running in circles barking at the sky. I join him.   I WOULD NAME A MOON CRATER...

“Memory never recaptures reality. Memory reconstructs. All reconstructions change the original…” - Frank Herbert, “Heretics of Dune” I. A city has buildings. In 2008 I moved to San Diego. I had lived all my life back East. There was a recession goin...

A Poem You Wouldn’t Know is About a Woman   On a lucky day when I am pacing around my home wondering which birds are outside my window that morning, walking from the bathroom to the kitchen, wondering also how I should spend my day, I find a lo...

In the last minute of our marriage we stood at the sink, your back to me, listening to the water and I understood, suddenly, that this was the last call—
 If I speak, the program continues, if I stay quiet, then the end— and I felt the muscle along ...

Graham always brings smoked salmon to the Saturday ocean dip at Crown Beach. We eat it like animals, grabbing fat slices off the golden paper slab with our fingers and ribboning it into our mouths. Meet me in murky water, legs slapped with stringy e...

I hired the SUV at six in the morning to see the Củ Chi tunnels before the tour buses arrived. I brought two members of my IT team, Duy and Linh, plus laptops, waterproof clothes, and the kind of confidence that comes from booking things efficiently...

Easy, Clarence. This is the stuff of new nightmares and old temptations. This is the path to the bottle, the spring of youth for the cost of a liver; the late night drive. The sense of humor that dwells in the valley of gin and tonic forever. That i...

Journey "V" They greet us with allamanda wreaths – A ritual for tourists – the flowers drift in sacred Rivers and lakes, but with a paid ticket You earn the right to proclaim the local beliefs: how tall The Durga statue stands, how many line up to t...

There is a purr           when you sleep like rattlesnake beats you tell me when it is my time to die I will die i’m hanging           &nbs...

Discarded vials of blue oud and tomato leather left strewn askew                          on the bathroom shelf.  I wonder i...

I split my fingers across your warm palm to touch you without holding your hand   floating between surface and floor like a whale, knowing balance is temporary,   needing to come up for air some time, not yet, we connected because of our c...

They posted the numbers at 15:15 on Monday afternoon. Not an email. Not a meeting. No Q&A. Just an update to the Strategic Incentive Framework (SIF) everyone already had open—the one that tracked each employee’s value. At 15:16, Lina said, “Anyb...

It was the wanting that stunned me,  time that broke me apart,  learning life in the space time gave,  amid what I asked for  and what arrived.  The silence that carried stars,  the echo arriving in memory,  the pl...