The Common Room
Poetry | Essays | Photography
POEM: Nothing
What a way to dissolve—
to relinquish my crown
with both hands open.
POEM: Kali in the Roses
Love once passed through me
like warm weather through a valley —
it shaped the land,
then went on.
ESSAY: Untethered
I’ve let something go, and am happier for it. I’ve become a red balloon rising, escaping — not fleeing, ascending — and I win. I don’t take this sordid prize. I win by being honest and possessing integrity, by moving on with my name still intact.
ESSAY:
This goldfish is one of those things that will never tarnish in my mind. He remains fixed there — luminous, and unreachable, and so beautiful. Many things are this way in my life.
Poetry: Descanso
One dim hour folds into another dim hour.
One disappointment closes its eyes
as its child opens its own.
One face practicing its lying
rehearses in the mouth of the next.
POEM: The Misplaced Light
I have the birds not asking my name,
the sun dropping its gold into my hair—
I have this solitary, difficult, exacting thing.
I have the animal world, wild and free,
whose many faces open like an invitation:
witnesses asking for nothing back.
POEM: The Feast Before the Forgetting
And then, at last, the only question
that contains all the others:
Where are you?
Oh, my life.
POEM: Wanting To Die
What a thing to finally say aloud
when the light is already dimmed,
when the window holds its own cold.
POEM: Conversion Until Dead
All night I work him against that taut expanse,
pigment opening like a mouth,
the wood-pressed departure of each stroke
leaving its ghost in the surface —
evidence of arrival and leave-taking
in the same gesture.
POEM: Exit Canticle
I am not waiting for it.
I have already walked into the pellucid distance
and become indistinguishable from it—
wide,
ungoverned,
finished with grief.
POEM: Apparat
It seems
people have a worse time of it.
Honesty—
a losing move
Masks Fall… Inevitably
This is what makes it so bewildering to encounter in people who present as feeling, thinking, and/or complex. The capacity exists. The choice not to use it was made anyway. That gap between what someone is capable of and what they choose is where character actually lives. Or doesn’t.
Poem: The Mountains of My Torso
POEM: Katabasis for No One’s Benefit
The Ever Watchful Eye
ESSAY: What We Are Willing to See
When a crisis becomes undeniable — when you can see it, every day, in real time, on the screen in your hand — it stops being a political opinion and becomes a personal reckoning. You have to decide what you stand for. Not in theory or merely in your affiliations. But in your actions.
Poem: Who Cares
Who cares she thought —
running among
the hedges of shapes,
the green of youth,
the wrestling of brocade —
Poem: ELEGY WITH JASMINE AND IRON
Poem:My Country (With Two Right Feet)
A country with two right feet
cannot keep its balance.
Poem: Inventory Of A Throat
Goodbye California with shackled ring like impending doom,
then New Mexico opened its mouth under the wide motel night—
and his hands decided the rules and the border.
In a tilting room the future went dim,
and my name was a light he could shut off.