In the deep of time indigenous tribes
surfaced a red earth with protruding plateaus
and burnt canyons along the Cimarron River.
The ancient Anasazi settled
at the core of this mesa.
Scattered ponderosa pine.
Yet, their sudden demise echoed curiosity.

Navajo sensed a struggle of two infinite worlds,
a quivering inundation.
Circling its haunted ominous shape,
a skull with one eye, the apparition of light
rose into a blue desert sky.

Violent storms crackle hot lightning
strikes in a sulfurous summer-
an oracular hothouse.
Navajo talk of spirits or the gateway
to fire. Heaps of iron and lodestone
lodged in the cap. Only two
brazen, cat totem poles guarding its passage.

Standing among the mesa
to feel the verve of the earth.
A New Mexico sun beats down
burning the drowsed terrain.
To see the legendary shaman glow
in his ephemeral blue nimbus.
Bathed in gaudy turquoise.

Sensing the dark encroachment
of a ghost. Near the bony hills, soared
a turbulent black bird in full flight,
upward.

You want to go back
to where the sky was inside of us.
I walked in the white silences
of your mind and saw fear
multiply while summer
crackled beneath wet suns.

-

Inside is this rolling energy
tugging at the walls of body.
I do not know how to pull it apart
and separate it from myself.
A vulturous animal sleeps
inside of me, and all I want
is to close my eyes
and rest this feeble frame.

Wallowing inside the blackest sleep
I see images grow large and transform
into what feels like reality. Each night
my brain is transfixed on tragedy
and the loss of a loved one, as though
my soul is craving tears, lucid dreaming,
a haunted atmosphere.
These moments remind my body
that is alive, full of breath, a moving
corporeal skeleton. The wilderness
of my bones hear the dark silted thoughts.
Each wave comes with white spinning stars
as a granular moon sinks into my spine.

A blackening morning bleeds and deepens
the opening of iron lungs. Paperweight
bones threaten gaiety and the smell of sleep.

Such sadness pours inward, it has chosen
the wrong body as cold folds over the world,
so it feels real, stained frost in vacuous black.

The pure leap of malignity agitates
the interior of a woman's red heart,
melting like embers.

In the sulphur, words dry while water
slides down. Drips and thickens.
Gaping hole exposed- too early for the dawn.

There are too many people here.
Streets are crowded with vendors
and an indelible smell thickens.
Buildings are painted a faint blue, or pink;
they rise upwards, lofty and erratic.
On the balcony of my hotel their roofs are speckled;
one of every color.

Outlandish art fills sun-glazed shops.
Some are only twenty feet wide. Motorbikes
wiz down the cracked roads with intimidating speed.
I look up to the knotted powerlines strung above
cluttering the backdrop of twine green trees.

In the humidity, there is no fresh air.
I can scarcely breathe. Here is a city
impractically shaped, a different world,
but the tender is coming as I descend further.

In the interior is Birla Orphanage
where laughter spreads.
The children wade gigantic waves
on the shore of Do Son Beach.
Mucky water sticks to the sand on our skin.

A boy, three feet tall, beautiful bright brown eyes
peers into my life. I do not know his language,
the most we can do is share gaping smiles
as this city unfolds its secrets to me.

I met a girl under the quivering black water
washed by the icy sharpness of drowning.
She looked up at me, silent, faceless,
without identity. Breathing salt
from the river with a frozen voice.

Tiny electric eyes scanned
the colossal reservoir with a desire
to escape the surface of watery
dark weeds and coral twig.

The prickling ache of sleepless
blood stuck inside me as I stared
into the maelstrom of identity
swimming in warped silence.

Now I sit, spiderlike, waiting.
The cauldron of night dragging in my veins.

Your eyes mirrored pools of black
ink and I never knew that the flask
in your pocket would keep me wide
awake into the morning.

The olivine porch outside your country
home was shaped with darker thoughts
and milkweed seed that left me
wondering how you wake in winter.

You lived as a sleeper in the valley
with a zirconium smile and when light
rained down the glass of your hanging lanterns
would break across the sky.

The smoothness of smoke that wrapped
around my lungs kept me lurking
in the corners of drowsy living
and drunken rainbow fires.

You could never offer me more
than what I already had.
So as with everything, the end came
and now the wind is blowing prismatic stars.

Brassavola nodosa*: Lady of the Night

Drinking deep the cold water
with her loose, slender petals
that wrap the aspidistra tree,
she waits, just before dusk
to release her moonlit fragrance.

Dark welcomes this ghost-white
orchid that proves love blooms
in nature with a night to drown
the stillness of a leafy bedding.

The wild-eyed child opens her gaze
to this wonder hidden in kudzu vines
of a Brazilian forest that does not sleep
so soundly with its dragonflies.

Only the moon knows she speaks
of fallen petals and longed for rain.

On the Summer Solstice
Half asleep wine-flushed stumbling on the internal billows.


Here is Where We Live
We are a companion to the owls with countless white moons.


Aurora Borealis
The earliest sway of dreamscapes came with dancing ghosts.


When Shall I get back to that Other World?
Thunder echoes off the walls of a tall obese world, pregnant & shifting.


On the Winter Solstice
Above the mountains earth drinks the sun quietly in the black Alaskan forest.


When People in the Lower 48 Marvel**
All I want to tell them is how living in its dark bitter sadness is a voyage.

I hear bones twitch in the flower bed
turning over their trembling groan to the
deep soil with bitter solitude in some strange way.
Autumn swirled her cracked wind that shook the
willowed branches as I clung desperately to my
rhythm in the wilderness blindly following the
flicker of an empyreal garden that glowed
along the path in a mysterious way.
And me happiest, when the earth offers
a place to sleep amongst the billows of the sky.
Most beautiful as sunlight pours itself across
my body, a reminder of simply being alive.

How many years will it take me to
forget the days we lapped the corners
of your mother's artless garden
tottering on Autumn's fruitless season.

The sunken mornings brought winds of
rupture in our chests; mingling in our
underwear, standing in the doorway
while I whistled you a song about how
intimacy can be undoubtedly forgettable like the
moon-blued waves we saw the weekend before
sleeping on the south shores of Astoria.

I expected every wave would have swallowed us up.
Sea salt stuck in my scrawny hair and we wasted
the afternoons trembling beneath layers of
flickering guilt. This moment, yearned to have
its imprint swollen shut into the crevice of my bones.
But now, its tides later and you married last October
and I don't see the point in remembering you.
Now half-drunk on an absentee love.

My early sea town home came
With strides of colossal change floating between
The marrow of my bones; gnawing inside.

Chance always showed me where to go
Landing near deep, blue-green waves
That washed the soft slumber from my eyes.

Perlious seas to cover the silence of a murmurous beauty
Pouring into the Colombia Gorge that flows a horizen-line
Against the rim of peaceful strangeness in the city.

Darkening dusk hovered in the wide quietness
Of Forest Park with lanterns lit along the west coast
while I counted the spaces of plum-colored stars.

There I went running on the hills through the virescent woods
Of tall evergreen trees dripping wanton rain into the hollows of a wet earth.
Dressed in ghost-white like a wayward drifter.

Night, emitted a warmth of drunken red wine
With tireless voices laugh shaken to beats of ethereal music.
Departure struck me with sudden change to a new home.

Ripped away and fixed in the belief of happenstance.
Always to remember the feeling of being young
On this cold night in Oregon.

She endures the internal progression
of a lingering goodbye.
Sifting through the waters
as days become years.
Yearning for tranquil solitude
to offer closure.

Split between two halves.
The moons are plenty full of madness
with a world of ever changing seasons.

Suddenly the rains begin
and she sits beneath the canopy tree
contemplating her next hour.

Twenty-three years now and the same sun rises
along the rim of a big blue sky with layered clouds.
A myriad of kaleidoscopic colors leaks through
surrounding me with nostalgic warmth.
Remembering everything that brought me here.

That sticky, unbearable Texas heat
whirling in the wind of a summer afternoon.
Sleeveless dress, sunburnt skin, watermelon smile.
Five years of beauty growing into a thin young girl
who wanted to learn about everything,
Shifting into the youth of an actress in an over-the-top
melodramatic performance at a local theatre.
Selling art and collecting coins to travel
across our globe, and then,
my first plane ticket to Vietnam.

Nineteen came dressed in bittersweet wanderlust.
Packed my bags and drove my car to Portland, Oregon.
Four cameras, disheveled notebooks, ink-stained hands.
Those tall forest trees of enchantment,
a photographer's dream.
Traveling down the west coast to desert lands:
Seattle, San Francisco, Santa Fe.

Somewhere in there I ended up sleeping beneath the stars
with a belly full of wine in Alaska.
The summer solstice singing me a song while tears brim up my eyes
because the world has never looked more lovely.
Aurora borealis shimmering her lights above
a reflecting ocean of pastel
Reds and golds, blues and pinks.

A lucky lady who has touched corners
of love and sadness and wonder.
Burned imprints of goodbyes
in the crevices of my mind, but this is who I am.
Living and breathing in this extravagance.

There used to be days
where the sea met my toes
and my hair would tangle
and salt would stick to my skin.
I would lie down along the midnight shores
and listen to the echoes of madness.

The darkness
would swallow me up,
its soft, feathery insides.
I remember tears,
my throat closing in,
silent, static.

Cold air would seep into my bones.
Wet, distant, lonely.
A permanent malignity sifting
through the chaos of my mind.

Tonight, in the darkness of this dimly lit earth,
The infinite stars burn with a translucent color of yellow
resembling the
bulbous moon
shifting, watching.

The trees stretch their willowy spines
over sprouting flowers
against a backdrop of watercolored silhouettes.
A cold rush of air trickles through
leaving behind drops of dew;
lilies, laburnum, larkspur.

Dawn, with her elongated fingers and wispy breath,
steals away into the night.
Patterned and fixated on the early hours of
rose colored reveries when all the earth
bows to the morning star.

And here we lie.
Broken people eclipsed
with secrets, wishes, dreams.
Waiting for our chance
to mask, to revel in the beauty
of a single muse.


Kara Troglin

A ghastly Japanese orchid thrives with engulfing stems.
This night flower pierces itself into the black earth.
She is layered with thick soil that gives way
to the forest of frost, swallowing the green weeds beneath.
The Atlantic sea shifts itself to the pattern of fixed stars and chaos above,
there will always be drops of sadness falling to the earth.
Somehow they make their way into the sunrise,
mixed in with the rain that I can taste in my cup of black tea every morning.
A hurting brain that molds itself into the pattern of mundane phrases, my head a moon.
Mania and depression consuming this red heart.
A stolen life with shifting moods. Always changing. Never constant.
Perhaps I consider myself lucky when love finds me
sleeping in the corners asking me to simply wake up.
So I will open my eyes and just exist.
Filling the lungs with whole breaths.
Letting the warmth of my existence radiate.
Believing in the surrounding beauty of a green earth that always survives the magnitude of the storm.