Home is a red-shuttered house with over-
grown hosta plants, sold to a Chinese couple
whose translator loved our hummingbird
feeders and the way the house faced East.
We had a swimming pool, frog pond, two
pink bikes and matching helmets--mismatched
childhood memories nine years behind me--

we moved to a ranch, where I painted my room
the color soft, baby grass fighting through
wintergreen fertilizer, the kind my father
scattered over our front lawn, hoping to grow
something above the underground spring
flooding muddy, brown, saturated as we
became when my mother remembered her
locked-away childhood, my father broke
his back, my sister succumbed to self-blame,

and I cleaned up after it all. Our ranch holds
these events in its powder-blue walls, creaks
at night and wakes me from a dream repeating
nine times over--where I stand inside that red-
shuttered house, beside an eleven-year-old
me with honey hair bleached from too much
sunlight, speaking softly: you’re almost home.

Sapphic poems call upon mathematic
skills, as meter meted out over three lines,
groups of two feet followed by three, again two,
                              ending with five beats.

Even this old formalist, prehistoric
in his method, limps along through elevens,
just like playing Jethro Tull, Lynyrd Skynyrd;
                              seven-four, five-four.

Hear the roar of dinosaurs in the tar pits,
stuck in sonnets, villanelles, rhymes and rhythms,
sinking slowly, praying for preservation;
                              creative fossils.

Another
brave soul
capitulates; here be
dragons.
Everyone
faces their
greatest
horror
in good time,
just so long as they
keep on
living.
Many like myself will
not be deterred,
opting to embark upon a
pilgrimage of pain.
Questioning what
remains in my
soul
thickens and sets
up my
very blood
with
xanthan gum.
You're next, o
zealous one.