I'm thrilled to share that two of my poems are up at Last Exit today, as part of their second issue! This is my first poetry publication, and I'm very grateful to Julia Dixon Evans and the whole team at Last Exit for including my work. And look at the rest of the line-up for the issue! Two of my faves, Chloe N. Clark and Cathy Ulrich, are also in there, plus a whole bunch of writers who are new to me, whose work I'm looking forward to getting to know better.

Check it out if you get a chance!

Some day gray hair will fall
from my nose, gnarled, silver-white
live-oak roots reaching toward the soil.
No longer manicured garden, presentable
for the neighbors, weeds
plucked, lawn mown, now
a thicket, a rain forest, impenetrable,
uninviting and untameable when
at last no one remains
to impress
or attract.

I’ll probably still shave, though.

the
plip
plip
plip
of a slowly leaking
showerhead and the smell of old metal and damp concrete
and the sour pinched laugh in his voice when he says ugly and chink
and the scrape in my throat from the passage of my rage
and the clang when his back hits the locker door
and the warmth of the soft white skin of his throat under my fingers as they tighten tighten tighten and i don’t care anymore i don’t care his pink tongue protruding from behind his teeth and my jaw explodes and the world tilts and when i look up again the blue eyes behind his crooked glasses are shocked and scared and trying to be defiant and i was fifteen but if i had been born that day i’d be able to buy a whiskey now and would it be better to feel nothing than to keep living here after all these years and did he know i’d some day tuck my own kids into their beds while i’m still stuck here in this cold empty locker room just him and me did he know do they ever know

No. Of course he didn’t know. How could he? He was only a kid, himself.

I saw a ghost walking down the street
today It wore the face
of a man who was my father almost
thirty years ago
when we lived
by the path that walked below
the Bixby Bridge
This apparition had fifteen years
too many to be the callused hands I knew
and fifteen years too few to have yet become
yellowed and brittle fallen
by the creekside like the cottonwood leaves
A memory's memories must be
holed and creased and worn like
old sandpaper
so if it did not know me well
I was a child then and now
I am not
Looking back
the likeness faded
into a pot belly and glasses
rounded shoulders and a tucked-in polo
I never saw him after all

"Little Bear," I said,
"that is a tiger, not a hat."
It perches
precariously for a moment, then
slides down to the floor.
Little Bear, enraged,
shakes her fists, throws the tiger
across the room where
it lies in a heap, patient
for her return,
for this is the way
of little girls.
Little Bear, undaunted,
crawls and nods
and puts the hat back on her head.

Square black tiles
three abreast
a column stretching
ahead and behind
marching
under and through
brittle stars' arms that writhe and bend
little amoebas the sun makes
merging blending radiating rippling dissolving
reaching
as I reach
pull
propel
Champagne bubbles from the passage
of my hands tickle my skin
kiss my cheeks
slide by
evaporate
There is only me
and the water and a four-count rhythm
until
inevitably

a wall

Fingertips scraping concrete
I fold
turn
push
and for a moment
a respite
floating flying coasting

One down
sixty-three to go.

The light that enters your eye makes a circle on your retina, an illuminated disc that has a defined border. Do you ever think about that edge? Inside is everything you see, from the sharp center to the fuzzy periphery. It feels like everything, but cross that line and suddenly there's nothing. Not darkness; nothing. Trace a line across the back of your head from one ear to the other—what's back there? Blackness? Void? No, but whatever it is, you are simply unaware of it. Will you poke at those boundaries, try to fix them in your sights? Perhaps from the corner of your eye, track a fingertip as you move it backwards, until finally it passes from view? Things simply become indistinct, without beginning or end.

Just like life.

Sometimes I think that if I could catalog everything I ever did wrong,
Stick a pin through every prejudice and privilege,
Put every passing meanness behind glass
With a little paper label beside it,
Time and date and explanatory text,
“In 2013, he didn’t appreciate the things he had,”
Well then I’d really have something to feel good about.

There between
A pair of sweatpants
And a spent dryer sheet,
A little shimmer of satin.
After nineteen years,
I still
Get a little thrill.

If he said he didn't love you anymore,
But then he said he changed his mind,
Would you believe him?

Would you?