“When we are trees are we dead?” my niece says
“no, we are trees” my little nephew tells
me over video chat
I smile so deeply that I shatter passed the notions of “ me and tree” and I wish my life as a tree offers as much shade from the harsh sun as I hope my life as a human does until there is no sun, no we and we are one

Everything became it
and it became me
and toggled between matter and gi

How do you transform anything
now I know only with love

Are you modern poetry and am I translating you
can I run my fingers ever so slowly until I remember you so well
that from your skin I can craft an alphabet
are you
life so exquisite and voluptuous
that I cannot get away from you without wanting to write you ****** free verse or an ode to your blades of grass
a sonnet to your beloved sea so pristine when it glistens
that instantly I fall back in love

what about it does not make me weak at the knees? You just keep surprising me.

How is it life that I came to you ?How did I get this lucky?

What is birth and death as I hold them ? Are you really in between them ?
or have you always been there ?

I am another river—
indomitable. made in your image. mutable

Just appreciate your youth
go wear silly & funky stuff, cut
your hair ,change your hand writing
go for a new pair of shoes
Dang, pick a favorite new color every week
until you cycle through the rainbow
and then do it again
change what you think young is
Pull of the masking tape that says 20, clean off the sharpie lines that read 40, laugh at the fact that next it you wrote 60, baby head for the jugular and once and for all liberate yourself, no age is the right age
for feeling youthful and fully alive
no age comes with requirements

This cracked vase, shatters
leaving only the space around it to witness

I pass my hand through the space
only air, I breathe–

I am being stretched and little parts of me are ripping off

but I want to, I want to grow
even if it’s not always pleasant

I want to be a womxn after her own soul
i want my authenticity far more, for I fear
I cannot compromise these lengthy rivers in me
they span too wide
and some too deep 
flowing rapidly down steep mountains
and over vast stretches of land
flooding plains, but also paradoxically
in arid climate nurturing seedlings

Somedays I have no words, so I do not send correspondence, instead I send you a silent prayer.

Light and warm, so that it can rise and be carried by the wind outside
where ever your feet roam
and over whatever pillow your head rests

Still maturing…
never too ripe
always eternal
and with one foot
in time

you are across the street
and so am i. we are walking
in the same direction. the sky is dimming preparing its arms for the dark lull in
which only stars sing.

the people sauntering
around us are their own celestial bodies detached from the outside world
in their mind, inside their screens– far, far away.

we pass them on the street towards
the same place light years from one another wondering if I tilted my phone and aimed it’s reflection into their eyes if they’d receive, if the speed of light can carry my message.

Be a keeper of the light
a guardian for the beautiful things within your own heart

When you come so far to be left
   with no response for months, years until

It feels like an eternal dance floor where hope has propelled
  you to stand at the periphery watching as they dances with another

When you come so far to be the last kid chosen for teams
  only to be told that to include you would be one too many (odd you)

It feels uneven, but not uneventful how your heart                breaks
  and still the blame is never split like you wish it were
       (some for you, some for them, some for time and some for life’s  required modules) 

the candy during recess is not  split fairly  
                     When you come so far fairness dissolves
                     off of  the countenance of the other kids as they begin
                      to grab what they can

And you wonder if that is what they did to you
                   grabbed what they could and left
                   or if that is what they think of you
                    
It feels like a tragedy or a terrible comedy cast,
                  staged and off broadway now
                  maybe they feel the same

The dancer who does not want to dance under the disco ball and the ones that want to dance but are standing around waiting might just feel the same.

I don’t now what it is about the way skin is fragile and tender to the touch
no matter whether young or old that makes smile and love our little boats islands of flesh each so different, each so radiant and full of beauty

What gifts can I offer
What can I give
I want to make beauty so that it surrounds the human heart
comforts it and wills it to carry on
What can I offer, I ask again
should I draw a hand or paint a beaming ray of light
Should I sing lullabies back to the night

What questions can I ask
What statements can I make
which requests can I utter
Are
Guide me, grow me, make me forgiving and more gentle
appropriate
Do I need more reverence for life
including my own

I do not like stagnation I like rivers and how they naturally flow
I want to make beauty

First he pretends not see Lily. Then, she comes near. And he says “Away Lily”
“Shoo Lily” and she responds with calm “ but you howled so I came”. He pauses tucking his fangs

Lay down the thoughts that are like smoke
hiding the reflective mirrors of doubt.

Rest your mind well
and ease the racing predictions,
scenarios of doom and possible gloom
that chip away at good things.

Soften your glare,
here,
there is no need to worry,
life has already been so much worrying

This is the point you rest, rest deeply
in your hope

Ten times you can circle over the same high peak
cycle through the seasons as you dare not to mountaineer
but every mountain of feeling must be felt
there is no way around such peaks
only lowly grounds where the merit of sorrow is the only badge you hold
and a hefty heart gets heavier with each
time around

to the ever rotten glory of drying rats
at the entrance of a drain in L.A

they scurry like acrobats making the tight rope
electrical wire journey in a few seconds
"wow, look at them go!" spills out of an apartment window
it might as well be talking about the rats and not horse races
  
fluffy like your neighbor's dog, scruffy
elegant only in the way our wobbly daughter completes
her kindergarten ballet practice
these rats could be gloriously nimble chefs

the sticky finger you get after summer watermelon bites
I bet these rats get after pulling apart market bags of garbage
to find food is this new Los Angeles landscape that the 1850 compromise exacerbated along

every edge of your body that slept
slowly awakes
how could slumber be
sweet when it robs you takes
your money and still asks
for the product of your eyes

What are you without vision?

Silence as you gasp and before you scream

Silence

A sigh is another place in which one can find the quiet residence of a lexicon

In complete silence women pray;
some do so in the zealous quietude of their rooms
where the silence is like a mime
sending only signs

Silence comes while the musicians wait attentively on their condutor to count them off

Silence is what we endure
when we believe we do not have a tongue


Silence

When a moment is full of beauty our mouths and minds lay cusped in that second’s ineffable existence

Silence

The great friend of fools and the great companion of the wise.

We looked at the state of our nation and there was only silence

what followed was drowned out by all the noise in a place
where there was no room for silence

It is the cool basin of her skin I curl up to i press against my calmest self
and savor the fresh invitation within my own hands

At a dinner conversation she said
she felt relieved to be able to touch her partner’s toe to her own on Sunday nights

She said “I don’t think you can relate”
And I stayed quiet and thought of a life lived years ago
when I woke up with you upstairs cuddled and warm
Your  mother and brother downstairs.
Holiday near Mendocino lake
where I met your cousins and uncles
driving to Bay Area because that is where you grew up and meeting your old elementary school teacher the one you had crush on

waiting for you cross legged on the roof of my car

flipping through cds and vinyls in Berkeley -Rasputin and Ameoba
grocery shopping and you towering over
always having to lean down to kiss me
It seemed like a life lived years ago but it no longer seemed to fit or feel mine so I remained quiet
that girl, that world is outgrown

Toes on a Sunday night
were a gift from a past life

Transform my heart into something beautiful
something that knows of lightness and of the daily pleasure of constant self love and appreciation

Transform my eyes, so that they can see truth even when it isn’t spoken

And change me, so that I do not accept what is as a finite option
I want to be reminded that tomorrow can change.

So transform me, I am willing to shed all the things that bring me sorrow.

I am willing to let go of all the guilt I use to keep myself down under.

change me, I am ready

Like the earth, I too am in rotation aligning with the stars above me

It feels so raw so fragile
a pink bubble gum bubble blown out falling back a little, creasing when it beats

I have sung 365 songs with your name in them butnever have they touched your shoulder. In the dark alleys, holding friends up as they tell me how angry they are. How disillusioned they feel. In the morning hours I lay our all the  evidence on the dirt street like chess pieces over a board not to try to convince but to show them that their  “ ****** up__”  as **** as it has been is also what life has been. No redrawing,undo, no control z but that the  flash of light is also as brilliant and potent as the jet black in their hair, in the alley, and in the hands of who ever hurt them their neglect.

On the chess piece I lay a shoe for times I was dragged from under the sofa and beat for leaving a can of coke unfinished, on the board I leave a piece of hair for the chunk that girls in elementary school ripped off my head after school, on the board I leave picture of a naked Barbie for the times I was molested, and to the corner I leave a small receipt that was left in my bag the night after I was too drunk to say no and did not know to call it **** until a few years later. On the board I leave a flight ticket for the love for a man for which I crossed an ocean, and in the middle I leave a white flower for all the times I willed myself up alone from the floor.

I can only show them. Some days I leave some parts out; some friends only know some parts and some of them have no laid their pieces on the chest board and we all all wept for the things that have been lost


Cried in a living room to Marley “no woman, no cry”


At the end I throw over the chess board and watch the chess pieces fly off in different direction. So what
So what
So what
I still have this life to live

I am strong
I am brave
I am carrying my bright light
and my life calls to me
it does not matter how much you resist change or want to put me down or get in my way

I am not in opposition of life nor in opposition of  you; everything inside of me flows like water and I listen for the direction of the stream
perhaps you are not listening
maybe you are too caught up in other things
in that case my dear girl joy is a compass and your heart sees roads your mind cannot fathom

I am not afraid
I am trusting of this world
I am well able and I do not need to cling anymore to anything in desperation
for whatever I need
to get through
I have got deep in my soul so whatever happens know you stand facing a womyn who is full and wholly
And I would always offer you my hand even after you have trespassed
I am passed the black and white notions of life, of books, and dogma, of not searching inside of me, of shutting out my own inner wisdom to conform to outer guides
I only listen my guardians when they whisper through flickering lights
you cannot bring me down
there is not down here
where my being abides

when you gave it your whole heart the
baked porcelain shards you picked up from the kiln
tell you
there really was so much there
too much
so much moisture that it expanded too quickly
too fast and you exploded
landed over by the thermocouple
hit the reflective coding at the top of the kiln and
was hurled down to the corner
that pieces of you even hit the center, too
and that others landed over the vases other artists had fired along with yours to bake

your whole heart did not rip or break: it blew open


fell into every part of the kiln, ate space and unwillingly
in a burst realized  expansions

You are not an object to hold onto you
you are living breathing being
you are not at fault for anything
I understand the way life flows
it seeks constant renewal
it is in constant change

Speak your words
Take them, from the street signs
Tear them from the books, from the thoughts nestled into song, take them
clip them onto your chest, and once you are ready
pull each of them off and stack them on your tongue

Saliva to soak them is all you will need and when you feel like you’ve had a bite full and
it’s much more than you can chew

Thats the minute you will start choking up,
And that is when you will know you are back.

Move your body
Let it move in any way it must move
and make sounds
Any sounds

Now open your mouth
and speak
You are alive again, with your own words caressing your lips.

it as if we disappeared
our hands never making it past the hanging  veil
voices muffled by cloth
20 arms stretched forth holding in a cry
worker’s limbs, your daughter or sister
racing heart when they shouted out of pain
they could no longer stand

When labor too pressing too demanding stood in front of them a well dressed  smooth talker and asked politely for just one of their fingers
they again screamed

the stitchery of the past lifts off
and circles like Angeles the crown of my head
I follow the morning and
I peek into a 9:00 am mass to listen to prayers. I try to find my grandmother so I look at the same row she would sit in. In a different city, in a different church, in another bench but instinctively look at the third row on the right. There is an other women bowing like the others as the priest cues with his words. She is not my grandmother. They are not my grandmothers but they are someone else’s   If I had opened my eyes here
on a hilll in Haebangchon as did
my dear friend 15 years my senior
Then one of them might know my name
but they smile as if they do

So I pour all the verbs into my own life
and it slowly feels so much better
and I am in no hurry for anything

I am settled and in the rhythm of this

My my
my little pumping heart
little ocean of hope
birthing Venus over foam
my earthly tether
my Tonantzin bringing new life
into my breathe
my my
my miraculous corazon
dancing in my chest

A turtle dove brings its wings into its sides and dips
beginning it’s a descent into the air below it

like a seasoned diver with great confidence
gliding through the blue

Maybe for some people love quantified by the things your give them or the physical proximity of you to them, what will they do once you die ? Will they think you have stopped loving them?  

Can they feel the world? The way in which birds feel the air currents while defying gravitational law

Are they aware that nothing truly dies?

I am a lounging lizard
in love with the sun and the brightness of life
in small daily deepening rituals abides the warmth of my heart and a sense of gratitude to last a lifetime tenderly unfolds and continues to drape this expansive existence

Simply in flesh
expressing

simply like you
born into earth
breathing

simply here
for just a while
living

simply all of life
loving itself
in disguise

simply
and humbly
trying
(like you)

Do others find
the things that  I find
beautiful
beautiful? Did you ever travel
through that question
on your way to getting older

Do they find him (in the crowd of people)
beautiful?  the old man sitting
on concrete steps under the the street lamp reading a newspaper
at 10:30 pm his sunken cheeks and eyes darker his hands moving slowly
and gently
beautiful

the young woman on her motor-scooter stoping in the side of the road, the light on her phone illuminating her face as she stares at a map pulls back in the handles and

Something is present in this empty room
The light coming through the window adds its brilliance
to the already present luminosity that oozes from everything
in this small apartment I am calm and truly home amongst my being

We get honest about the shadows
we get honest about the reoccurring feelings
we rip down our stories
so well woven spanning multiple pages that we gasp in surprise that we know them by memory

we hold space for them
and if that is crying
and if that a sentence that appears
floating from the heart to the surface carrying a message that  till then we could not bare to accept

...finally let’s not push it back down
lets look at it
let’s stop wishing things would disappear let look at what is true and allow its natural buoyancy lift over and over until
we finally offer it space and accept

Wildfires–

We are engulfed in fire
the soil dry and it becomes
drier
each year more homes
scorch
each year, the hottest year
recorded

                                ...

We are engulfed not just in California
as the flames rise higher but as a nation
surrounded by the indifference to facts

                               ...

Wildfires raging, images flashing from your screen
–wildfires in the mind igniting –
over the land and soon
over your old way of life

you burn too
slowly, inevitably
for the world is unmistakably one

one large fire of change made up of what
Galeano saw were small
little fires

ablaze creating fertile ground for new thought

I have these dreams
that keep me up.


There are golden pigeons that sing “come, come home” and you stand next to them.

I am scared every time I wake up that if I ever tell you, where home is you’ll laugh at me–think I am a silly girl.

The pigeons tell me to come home to you
to the land of the morning calm, across a sea from what used to be my childhood  house.

the pigeons sing loud and I wake up with their songs in my ears, and although I fear
I also dream awake, dream of a home and you standing next to golden pigeons.

The stores were open a bit later so I went to buy berries. Walking back home I turned onto my street and from the distance I saw an old man taking very small steps. He walked so slowly...when I had finally walked passed him he stopped me and asked me if he was close to a certain address. I could see his phone was out of battery. I pulled mine out and searched the address he had written down for him. With a few taps I knew he was six long blocks away from his home. I walked with him less than a block and when he noticed it was going to be very far he said thank you and kept heading that way but he was so slow and he couldn’t walk so well. It was nearing midnight and I could not let him go alone. Even if it would take an hour at his pace I would walk there with him but a taxi road by and I am fluent enough to say “take him here” and “ I will pay the fare” so hailed it down but the cab driver wouldn’t take him. He said “he’s not normal, he can cause me a lot of trouble” he wouldn’t take him. I walked with him arm in arm until I got to a bigger street there I hailed down another cab. I helped him into the taxi and asked to pay his fare. It was simple this time.

An old  man with a dead cell phone battery with a little paper medicine bag trying to get home.

“One day at time”
I say to myself
when my eyes redden
and my body feels exhausted
and the bathroom mirror is too close
and reveals me
to myself

All the frogs leap
all the walls feel like today
all words are near approximations
to what you can only point at

There is no need to churn the wind or try and turn morning light into thick butter

No need for truculent mirages of the internal dialogue to command the noon

breaking into the present with all your heavy layers of guardedness
will not suffice for tranquillity and true amity

The sparrow's songs blossom like azaleas
until they  become an open chorus sung in rounds amongst the trees
ever circling and deepening
they remind me of what life is truly like when we venture back
away from the illusion of thoughts

How did my father survive the streets of LA
a young dark skinned man
a mixed blood being in his prime

I flash back to the time he shouted at me while teaching how to drive
a  simple thing like me hanging  a small dream catcher from the rearview mirror
was enough

“They can stop you for any **** reason, Pita” he’d say.

what I didn’t know was that he was right
and what he did not account for was that I would not be seen as a dark skinned male the day I got pulled over in Davis, Ca by a cop and I stepped out of the car and walked straight up to him and he walked to meet me and asked me “Ma’am have you ever been pulled over ?” I replied “ no, this is my first time” and he smiled as if he’d popped my cherry. “I figured a small and smiling girl didn’t get of the car with the intention to start a fight” that is what my father did not understand
and I wish I could say I understood at that moment
and I wish that officer would of understood too that the only reason he did not pull a weapon on me was simply based on what I looked like

I leaned my head all the way back and watched the snow fall to ground
magical
nothing less than magical

May this be something with the potential of humanely beauty

Not:
one who gives and another who takes
that could be classified as exploitation

Not:
two selfish people who only expect from each other because if expectations are not fulfilled tyrants can grow resentful and angry

Yes:
to two people who give and nourish one another in this dance of life leaning on each other when needed, and springing back up on their own two feet so as to not lose themselves in the identity of each other

Yes: to partnerships deeper than personality and skin that bind at the spirit
and whose intimacy becomes richer with the years

Yes: to unconditional acceptance & love–
no judgement zones, the space to be openly flawed without shame