Flash bang grenades
rubber bullets
Riot guns with metal pellets

the tear gas isn't necessary to make anyone cry

I like that the people are sweet gum hugging you. You are everyone’s “daughter”
“My daughter” this is how my mother introduces me.

I adore looking at the elderly holding  each other as they start playing the ballads
they’re bodies like mazapán
fragile but the looks they give each other
suffice to sugar the landscape

I like to see the children run through the dance floor
on their faces joy is enlarged

The music is loud and constant
–and it becomes our bread of life

heal under the trees
no harm to anything
calm
like all things under the sun
I am a temporary thing
smooth my being
lull me with your singing
...
She would sing to me
all the time
she loved to chirp like the little birds
that would land on her pomegranate trees

even on her wheelchair she’d find a song with my name in it and sing “mi Lupita”

There is pleasantness
all around me
I will commit myself
to seeing it every day

comforting can be the night
as my body relaxes and becomes tender
with it, too the mind soothes
and there is no need to worry

there is pleasantness all around us
you can slowly let your body drift to into the serenity of sleep

Today I love the moon and all the dreams in my belly that speak of sweet womanly passion, of sweet burning match sticking life’s wick
of sweet, oh so sweet fervor to be everything I am with out compare
of sweet, sweet, willingness to release myself and continue

I am on a documentary dive
the way I dived in bars or went on pub
crawls

I am all in and after two glasse of champagne baby I want to cut my hair
I want slick Bob on this frizzy curly mane
of mine but I wait for Friday

Friday night when you are home and we can have three drinks each and sunk together I  will have the same recurring thoughts of a shorter cut to maintain the coolness on this hot humid summer night
and I will let you cut and the next we will wake up and go to the hair dresser where they will cut three more inches off my head of hair

You read about antiquity, believing it is far removed from you. When did those ancients begin to be ancient? When did the world of old end and swallow them? As you walk out your door with your children, the sidewalk is public. You step onto the park and head for the playground to let them play, and the playground is public, and so is this entire park, and so are the bathrooms and the basketball courts, public like the libraries. And just as your day winds down, you open up your phone without realizing it's a new age—your phone is a public space, too. The ancients of greece told that Medusa's blood gaves birth to Pegasus. Now, the devices of constituents surveil Pegusus into birth. When did the world of privacy end, is it in the process of swallowing us up or is it still digesting us all?

Everything springs springing
joy, over thin skin, over the fragile scent of spring that ends and soars like the birds before winter,
ever looming, before it looks us in the eyes

Everything even I open to the cold as I did to the warmth

I know that I don’t know
and that whatever I am is big enough to hold all brokeness and large enough to absorb all sorrow
it is all encompassing
living in the rocks and in the leaves swaying on the branches of the trees

I know that I do not need to know

What is a beautiful heart: a heart that does not accept to shrink.

There is warm serene tug at the center of my chest, and I wondered
what is calling out to me at this moment.

I sit with myself, take each unloving sentence off the wall and continue to cultivating this love, this smile that surprises me in afternoon, these hands that help sing to the birds and draw those I love in sketch books

I sit in my own well of joy knowing it’s the only one that can truly fill my thirst.

I am. Everything after that can fall away. Everything after that is a box.

1.
the dogs bark louder
the people pace more
the wind gets wilder

on the third day of curfews
the coping gets hard
the drive seems longer
the outside looks more distant than before we were blanketed by illness

but perhaps sickness has always been there
deadlier, reoccurring, cruel if you weren't born with fair skin
on the North American continent won over through war,
pillaging, enslavement, indoctrination, and more ...
where today you can only breathe heavy air
the hefty sorrow reigns as we try to cradle
the wings of its opposite with bruised
calloused hands

2.
–something good must come of this
something good,
there has been too much suffering
we pray for "something good"
something good must emerge of this

Something good please come of this
our whole bodies feel the weight of a breath cut short
as we should –separation does not exist

something good must come of this because we are all in this together
and it is time we push
add our part
to the great vision of an equitable world

3.
The heavy air makes it hard for your sisters and brothers to breathe
toxic sites scattered through the county  
cardiovascular disease, asthma, and low birth weight babies
being placed into the arms of your kin
the environment reflects the same sickness
steals the same breaths

My heart rests languid and full of sorrow
I could never read his mind

and he never shared his thoughts
and I circled like a bird over and over
over and over

dizzy and dizzy
and dizzy with my unrequited love

never did he allow me to land

One crane standing
in the shallow river
is enough to make me smile

One passing lifetime
in the depths of my being

There is a curfew in my city.
From 8:00 pm to 5:30 am.
All must remain inside

Still, there is daylight
Still, there are protestors
Still, there is prejudice

Still, there is sorrow

There is a history of enslavement in the forming of my country.
From the 1600s to now.
All people who weren’t deemed “human” went from chains to prisons,
to being killed on routine traffic stops.

Still, there is daylight
Still, there are sirens
Still, there is inequity

Still, some ask why?

I recall winter willows
over playgrounds wisping their smiles
and stretching theirs limbed branches towards me

Whatever should I do,

workin up the courage to knit a sentence or two to make something warm that stretches like their thin arms do
long past me to you

whatever for
winter has passed and summer rages around us


But the round yarn ball is still red, the end of its string has been tied to you

I recognize the longs leaves of the willow and I recognized you
I am sure they were there along before

Just as the seed was there before the thinness of the willow touched so we’re you planted dormant

When we dare sing into the world a new song
we do not lead it
we follow it and watch
how it cozies up to us and comes through the body

each year a bucket that if it were not there
the song’s rhythm could not be played in streets of dirt road and in the town where soul is more abundant than money

I love you, but you never came
I just sat here surrounded by buildings
and people in a neighborhood
within this big, big city
having left it all
and having bought my one way ticket here

I love you, but you have not come
and I have started to memorize the names of street and buildings
within the old neighborhood market:
I know what stand sells what
–having walked into all of them
and having peeked into the busy ones

I love you, but you still are not here

Earth is a beautiful place to love and to be loved. To take in a breath and calm the racing of an otherwise anxious heart. To burrow into its crust of time your home, unrepeatable it is this particular morning, this passing into night. Dance to rejoice that earth is your mother. No one can undo this: no man, government, or line drawn with a wooden stick of childish silliness. however much they try you dance for earth is your home. Earth takes a breath, and you, like the magnolias, the jacarandas, and the mesquites, breathe with it. All must know that this here is your home.

I am up waiting for the inauguration
sleep cannot come yet
I am too full of need
the necessity to see

There is an artist who walks into dreary hospitals and law offices
to accompany his partner
he cannot paint the walls of these building  the color he desires but he paints a smile-one so pleasant it calms-on his girlfriend face

Me has llevado a la celda de Cervantes
con Rocinante a tú lado
Ahí con todo el tiempo del mundo
contra el muro yo también escribiré



I will write

You have taken me to the cell of Cervantes
with Rocinante at your side
There with all the time in the world
against the wall, I too will write

Dear love,

I am hoping you bloomed in spring
and that this summer has given those around you
the sweetest fruit picked from your orchard

See I dream
and still long to love you;
fear is drowned out by the promise of fall that offers trees new cover

a surface siren of the air
with wings instead of fins
the black phoebe perched
on the wooden fence sings

calls me to the surface
of an aquamarine pool,

“Ah, yes … right.
this water shouldn’t be here. But you should”

This Phoebe is my neighbor
warm and welcoming, who stays
and stares before departing

the crows in  the mountains I used to climb
in Goyang recognize people

if a stranger was on the path on their way to the temple they’d crow three times

When I almost stepped on a snake they crowed repeatedly more than five times
as to warn me

Black Phoebe will you recognize me tomorrow, are we friends ?

I hope we get something better. The world is always beautiful and surprising I hope there are more  joyful moments on our separated roads.
deep down I know it will be so :)

Thank all the trees whose leaves
reach outwards
thank all the clouds above
for their seamless passage through
the sky  
and thank all the small ants
that venture over the gravel

The soil ends at my skin
How could any other human being not be found
amongst the traversed path of that tie
You tell me where they begin
and I end
and I will place the ground’s earth into your hands
and kindly smile at you
There we will become two kids
standing over the blacktop in our neighborhood playground
awing terra firma

Sometimes my skin falls off and I step down the streets naked of all thought
the wind fresh touches the wet saliva on  my lips
my skin tender it shivers
my soul light it feels only calm

When spring takes it lilies home you will find me starting the orchids by the window who survive the cold

you will find me standing
so grateful to be where I am
as I am

There are stories whose depths I do not know.

Narratives whose wounds I can only touch with the tips of my fingers
if allowed to.

Journeys that involve blood
and sorrow
the two of which have not been drawn out of own skin
but out of someone else.

There is a smile on
my face
I toil in small increments
towards dreams

We drove in search of scenery
native to our southern California

We trodded down the dirt paths
among plants whose names were lost
and quelled by history
here given back
not by scientific categorization but by
the cathartic heat that whispered
of the past and its abiding
presence  

here I snapped the cord
and named the unlisted
parts of me until I
clearly recognized the snapping
of summer's end

soon the leaves
would crisp but
the heat would remain far
into winter I see her eyes twinkle
under the palo verde trees and I know

it never severed the
funis
from my naval, it extends
beyond death, further
than the desert plants
that her and I see on our hike

we cradle, what is to come
so let us not hold back our visions
and our kindest of dreams

“Hope”called by many names
is the true muse
–it is the bird in our hands–
a torch passed down on this long and arduous journey

our desire to light the next one
and dispel the cold nights of hate is vehement
we cradle, what is to come

por lo menos e de seguir este sueño
hasta donde llege
no importa si involucre canas o bastón

yo iré, como si se esconde cerca
tras la flor, al otro lado del barranco
o al cruzar el oceano

iré con la fuerza y inercia
que me brinda la vida

I do not want to keep crossing lines people draw for me

So when my stupid heart want to run passed the painted line I now pull it back

I am not in-charge of redrawing that line
someone else is , the person who put it there is in charge of that

so I hold it, I hold this wild heart and comfort it
at least I am strong to comfort it now

and yes some part of me really wants to be there but there is that line

and I sink back down a little
and sink because I just don’t want to cross anything anymore
I want to feel to roam in someone’s garden
when I am invited
I do not want to invite myself when no one else has

We jumped and dodged mops
and chairs around the house so that we could in fact deliver the antidote to our dying playmate on the other side of the house. Then upon our arrival we opened our palms to reveal the loose pills of sweetart rolls that would indeed cure the our peer’s fatal illness as they giggled, and we choose what game we would play next.

Dear language you hold everything in the  long expanse of your eternal unfurlment  like the cosmos always expanding

We see constellations we have named
being  pulled further apart  
How could the space among planets  feel like the space between us

we sit and look out at your star
the brightest point is still love

I know it was rough waiting
I know it must of just not seemed worth it
when the world can be so simple
easy if you just let go

I was not born here
It was not as simple as “come as I please” here there are different ways of doing business
legal matters are all in a language I am barely functional in

they were not excuses
just the reality of me
not the fantasy or the dream
but another very real aspect
of accepting me for who I am in my totality
and that description includes “a girl who is just not from here”

si crees que no te entiendo lo suficiente
para quererte esta bien

no hay ningún pasillo del cual yo quisiera recurrir para hacerte entender

si tengo que ser igual que tú en toda manera entonces eres tú

el que no sabe de querer pues nada en esta vida es igual y yo tampoco

Wahh
I amaze my self
at the way I laugh nonstop
with my friends

how I am still so curious
and in love with learning
how I sink in deeper
and deeper until I dissolve

I have not only returned to myself
but I have leaned in further

ripening and softening
right here right now is the best
not yesterday not in some years
right now :)) and it makes me smile
and it makes me want to dance without any background music
because I have worked hard
and changed so much to be who I am
took risks, fallen and gotten back up, this heart has not been timid it’s been a steady monk
and it has circled back to now
and now is so good it makes want to shout

My friends keep counting the red flags and leaving them on my desk inside little transparent ziplock bags.

Anywhere I go and anywhere I land I will be okay

the more my tongue moves
the more arms I give to my words
and the more they take a hold of the twigs on the sidewalks
and the more they become life lived
oozing odes and homeric verses
suckling sunlight and holding the stanzas
from Sunstone in their palms

–precolumbian whispers
and sunsets before sumerian law  
hint at a time when poetry was one with the body
poesy inherent in all things
when no compartments could hold life and
all disciplines were limbs of the same majestic creature
sighing with relief over its infinite realm–  

and the less I need to chase words
in order to taxidermy them
and then place them into curiosity cabinets
and the fewer words you will see on the outside of  me
and the more adjectives you will see fused into my skin

the longest wavelength reflecting over my cheeks will become the longest poem I'll ever write

Because there is love
there is you

Because you burn bright
there will be her and him

there will be trees and there will be flowers

and on earth hope will persist

(It is a question left in my throat
I wish of  the little things to be granted wisdom and safe passage )

Dear flower,
keep my gentle and soft like you
share with me how you bursted through the dark earth

Dear sky,

who has blessed me with rain
whisper your wise counsel over me
like the rain and mist that engulfs us in June–what way is the sea ?

Dear red dirt,

When I hold you in my hands I cannot help but feel I awe. How do you remain so beautiful
have we always been as beautiful as you?

Sometimes I just want to dissolve into now and I want every scary thought or idea that comes as advice as warning to melt away. There is no one way. There is not right way. There is just what is… ever flowing. All possible. Pain and pleasant things nothing hinging on correct or wrong.

I will sit and catch the stones they throw at you.

I whispered those words
and the light inside my little Buddha statue began to flicker over and over. I starred  at it and this thought entered my mind like a banner being carried by a jet across the sky “there is always light”
I uttered it and the light stopped blinking
i forget I am never alone