The bartender says my moon's in Pisces,
Leo ascendent, sun in Aries.

The room loses its light, turns
the blued complexion of an oven

cooling off as the meat rests.
Elbows like tent poles

sunk into pocked bar top.
Thinking about all the Pisces

I have known, so many.
Maybe there's something in this?

Then I think about K----,
who went Chicago to Berlin.

When was her birthday again?
A dalliance in slips and slices,

two marriages on the skids,
hearts pushed through a sieve

across 700 miles. Was she a Pisces?
I remember she didn't want more kids,

& my world hardened.
I guess I'm to blame there.

When she evaporated, post-Berlin,
where did she end up?

Moon in Pisces, moon in Pisces...
lonely in my cylinders of beer,

the memory pares me down
until I'm just nerves fanning out

like the naked head of the tree
brushing up into brown eaves.

Bills  Bills  Bills  Bills
Never a Sam or Clyde
I simply can’t get out of debt
No matter how I’ve tried.

Bills  Bill  Bills  Bills
They come in twos and threes.
I wish that I could get a loan
To help me pay for these.

My credit score is way too low;
It’s only six-o-five.
I know they’ll never loan the dough
That I need to survive.

I didn’t know which way to turn
Until I spoke to Frank
He kindly said he’d lend a hand -
And help me rob a bank.

We put disguises on my face
And he pulled out a gun
We got some money in our bag
And took off on the run.

But we didn’t get too far
The coppers had us nailed.
They hauled us up before a judge
And both of us were jailed.

The problem now has gone away
My room and board is free
I have no monthly bills to pay
So I’m the winner, don’t you see.
ljm

for Lori


Foaming Pacific ovals
sweep cold over nephew's knees -

his laughter breaches sandy mount,
from flashing white crescent

of pepperminted mouth.
Palms above the char pit

chaperone my brother-in-law
as he hisses open enameled cans

of sweet seltzer. My sister
trades antique desert stories

with my aunt. Someone slings
Monopoly hotels back into the box.

August is climbing eastwards,
bringing a fog bank

that won't stop arriving,
arriving, always arriving.

[...] a recurring wave
Of arrival. The soul establishes itself.
But how far can it swim out through the eyes.
-John Ashbery, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror


Greasy brown sun smeared over hill,
buttering palm trees, melting in bay.

The Pacific shuffles cold and blue,
Spanish roof is red tooth grin,

irregular and hungry. Day clatter,
hurly burly in the sand pine,

& I'm phasing out, a laugh
lost in sway grass.

Conversations carry late
with new old cousins.

My mind rattles and clots,
needs ballast. Shush. Shush:

fog rises from the sea,
it never stops arriving.

the aggressive dote of the sun
   over the shimmering bleat of the city

muted by a power cut

In the legend of the lovers Tristan and Iseult, there is a small, magical, immortal dog named Petitcrieu who "ate half the sadness of everyone he met." He didn't gift any type of forgetfulness, but instead bestowed the ability to bear the sorrow easily.


Bells are ringing wet and pink
on a muscled shoreline of skin,

lining me with their tolling.
Their knell is so heavy in the ear,

it sinks into the sand chokes
trapped on my frozen tongue.

Someone great has vanished again.
The clang and clatter escapes

out of this red chest oven,
bangs around the wild world.

Grief is announced, by way
of cacophony. Where are the dogs?

The ones who eat our sadness
with their bellish barking?

Who look into our brief eyes
& remove the worst of the sting?

Who serve the moon, defy the sun?
They have gone missing.

Sorrow rushes through the waters
a blued frigate with a headwind,

overtaking the heart, the head,
the curried spine...

In this age, sadness is the magazine
that all of us are reading.