TRESPASS
To the North, a thickening,
smog or haze, fog or smoke,
nature made or someone to blame?
My mom FaceTimes me. She spotted another
rando perspiring in her tomatoes.
On one level I’m nearly certain
these creepers don’t exist. But who knows?
They keep us on our toes.
On screen we vibrate—one box
in Oregon, one in Indiana.
She tells me that the last time
my lips were purple like this
I had thrush. She tells me that she’s
rewatching Downton Abbey and
that it’s astounding
how much she missed the first time.
As she talks, bugs
kamikaze the screened-in porch,
guitar chords from the canyon,
a drop in pressure,
an alertness, crickets.
A shadow moves behind her,
along the privacy fence
tip-toeing the property line.
THE NOISE
Sea mist salts the lips out here
where the red edge of earth plunges
into the misnamed sea as we power
through our daily practice.
Mindfulness is mindlessness.
Drain your head like a dirty bathtub.
Profit has Progress pinned in the grass.
Static crashes in from headquarters.
Someone misgendered someone’s child.
Meanwhile, the corporate oligarchs
and their oxy-addicted serfs
have simplified their non-fluid gameplan:
the rich get richer, the poor get poorer,
the sick get sicker, the earth gets warmer.
These aggressions require no microscope.
You see them on the bodycam footage,
you smell them when our cities burn,
you hear them when our neighbors are taken away.
An oil derrick humps itself
back toward darkness and fossil.
Pelicans kamikaze, catch as catch can.
A few hate-filled precincts have yet to report.
Villagers await their blood-stained sheet.
Our better selves have been gerrymandered
into deformed Lego dragons
and we’ve lost the ability to breathe,
to acknowledge the reality of the breeze,
to understand which way the wind blows.
The purveyors of wellness know this,
so they flutter down on gossamer wings
and devour us whole like cocktail wieners.
PANGOLIN UNFURLING
April 2020
Things were bumping along
then we awoke under house arrest,
a predator in the mist,
our reality hyphenated, asterisked,
ellipses spilled across the floor.
Our experts had misread the recipe,
transposed the pinch of faith
with the dollop of science.
The bunkered typists twitched
and spat: It’s the Chinese!
The liberals! The homeless!
We all stewed in our juices.
The Oregon Health Authority urged
everyone to press pause on rimming.
Pure entropy knocked on the door
looking for all the world like the delivery person
taking a proof of life photo of our dinner.
Randomness is like that.
It wants us to see patterns,
the beginnings of order.
Language is a hurricane of faith,
punctuation a thief.
The anti-maskers demanded
that the economy be reopened,
especially the part that sells teeth.