She keeps asking what he does,
though his answers are recycled:
half-finished carpentry jobs,
French bulldogs, paintball,
a seventh-grade broken nose.

The basket of fries between them
feels like an interview.
She teases about sweat-stuck bangs,
neon-laced Docs,
his faux leather squeaking when he moves.

Her smile forgives empty stories,
softens each silence.

Condensation slips down her glass,
her knee brushes his-
a spark he does not catch,
his throat working like a valve.
The door opens, closes,
a draft follows smoke and cedar,
distant wildfires.

Outside, a truck unloads shrimp.
A box bursts on the pavement-
pink shells and thawing ice
sliding into gutter water.

Curses flare into the alley.
Engines idle.
Hydraulics hiss.
The stoplight clicks red to green,
green to red,
its metronome louder than either of them.

If you want to find God, you can go by rail
or catch a jeepney, repaired a thousand times
and driven by a madman with a rosary on the mirror.
Tell him you seek the Divine and be certain

that he does not misconstrue your meaning.
You go down General Luna street to the place
where the Moon and Mars both must bow
to the great glittering of the Creator's face.

When you arrive, look for the Indian Laurel tree
where a crow has come down the backbone
of the Sierra Madre to wait here for you.
He knows you have lost much, your child, your home.

The Sierra Madre crow can offer only baubles,
still-warm bits of pan desal bread, and his wise mein.
He is here, like the church of San Agustin,
as mournful as the Christ, as wounded, as kind.

Go inside, where adobe bricks contain time itself,
and the Spanish artifacts reconcile gold with rust.
There you will find Dibella, Alberoni, majesty and peace.
Outside, the kind crow, the Philippine sky, the laurel trees.

In Đà Nẵng my friends cradled me like a child.
We screamed Taylor bridges,
tequila-toasted in bars until the lights blurred.
A single candle in the bathroom
danced warm sighs through open windows,
and all felt calm.

I grew new muscles balancing on a motorcycle,
sometimes gripping Harry’s jacket,
sometimes throwing my weight into the wind.
The city flared neon and gasoline in stuttered traffic,
but along the coast
he drove so fast the vibrations in my chest harmonized.
I pictured my bones becoming butterflies if I let go.

Last year I entered the year of the dragon on a futon,
swayed to sleep by a hundred chanting voices from the temple next door
while Bailey burned incense for her ancestors below.
I did not dream of dragons.
I only learned to breathe fire.

The year of the snake slid in with new bones and old habits.
It hissed that suffering could be scripture
until letters slithered free from the page
and coiled like cold jewelry around my wrist.

That was the shedding.
Salt water peeling old skin away,
songs shouted so loud they drowned the ache,
poems that did not start tragic,
nights when my body finally kept time with the moon.

Then at home the dog’s teeth found my hope.
A terrified mouth rerouted rivers
through my soft parts.
A jewel carved from my nose.
Six punctures blooming across my arms like altars.

In Vietnamese stories the snake waits beneath the water
to claim whoever dares the bank.
I wonder if I was chosen the moment
I opened my mouth in those bars,
when I leaned into the bike’s curve
as if danger could be a love song.

Now I lie awake at hours unnamed,
tracing scars that hiss answers back.
Vietnam hums inside me still,
the candle, the coast, the chorus of friends,
but I cannot tell if they are memories
or if the snake is still awake inside me.

They say snakes shed to grow,
but no one warns you how thin the new skin feels,
how everything burns against it,
how you mistake survival for prophecy.

I touch the scar and wonder
if I am still that girl clinging to the bike,
or if the snake has already swallowed me,
patient, sleepless,
feeding on my own venom.

Arrive in a neighborhood not mine.
Phoenix sun splits the mailboxes,
Cracked cement, bald lawns, deflated kiddie pools,
sippy cups gone brittle in the sun.

A toddler screams
until a sibling gathers him inside.
Helios whips his chariot down the street,
steals my parking space.
White Shell Woman hushes the child
with a wind of cool dust.

I buy
donuts, Cheetos, pickles-
eat them in the car.
Gas station sink, hair and grit.
I scrub off orange powder.
Kokopelli swings from the paper towel rack,
flicking drops of water onto my face,
flirting, laughing at my small hungers.

Cemetery, sitting on the hood.
Graves hum in the heat.
Yours more-so.
Hecate steps from the shadow of a mesquite,
offers me three paths,
none of them home.
Coyote pads along the stone wall,
head cocked, grin sharp,
watching my pulse quicken.
White Shell Woman whispers:
Run.

The blood in me stirs-
knife-bright, restless.
I step off the hood,
already fleeing toward
any other life.

Letters not sent
Words untouched by hands,
There is no softer gaze,
Opening radiant ways
With rapid pulse of breaths,
In spoken sentences.
The invisible margin of lost attention.

I saw unsettling light,
The sun glinting on the window,
An ordinary building across the street
And an elusive, surreal reflection
Of a blurred sphere, not giving warmth.

I stare at this distorted image,
Wanting to endure it directly,
Longer than I could bear,
In a motionless pause
The side effects of this manifestation.

My eyes were slightly closed
To hug the contours of an unclear shape.
The luminosity from a distance
Safely stays at a fragile layer,
So as not to freeze and not to burn
Before the piercing, conclusive truth.

Being for so long and perfectly alone.
So many hours punished by the silence,
The long days in tamed anger,
Waiting for relief,
All those good wishes in letters were never sent.

The gleams turned in the blunt, painful light.
Just two living spheres and a clear, cold glass
In the ocean of rigid duties,
A star’s slow implosion,
Reshaped colorful memories, grasping at remains.

The vivid balloon with the air gone—
No longer flying above our heads.
Nothing else, just indifference that forgot
How it used to cry.

I was putting on jeans.
My dog was smiling.
Sun was coming in the window behind us.
We were there
reflected in the screen
of the old tv I had fixed myself.
A second sun
was reflected there with us.

I was young.
My dog was alive.
We would watch "The Adding Machine"
on the old tv that afternoon.
I was getting sober.
The room was small.
It was years ago
and I didn't know
that I would remember that morning
forever.

The Poetry of Waiting

Not the break,
but the breath before the break.
Not the silence,
but the listening it invites.

A caesura is not absence,
it is presence held still.
A hush with its hands open.
A comma that prays.

It lives in the gasp
between heartbeat and echo,
in the moment the dancer
hovers mid-turn,
in the glance that says
more than the line ever could.

It is the ache
that punctuation cannot name.
The pause
where grief gathers its syllables.
The space
where longing loops back to begin again.

We write it
with white space,
with hesitation,
with the courage
to not fill every line.

We live it
in hospital waiting rooms,
in the hush before “I love you,”
in the breath between diagnosis and reply.

Caesura –
the sacred seam
where poetry listens
to the body.