Poetry Published by San Antonio Review

"Am I not who you thought I would be?”

"It’s hard to be a city at night, sleeping along this big river. So much wakes you from slumber ... "

"for the 13th time i’ve looked at the time / glowing back from the phone that never sleeps"

“And there we stood / looking out in silence / at the great river”

“You’re the last dark matter from another outgoing night”

“He left one day without saying goodbye.”

"Turning the car around to make sure that pothole wasn’t a person."

“I love Miss Hooker plenty and want to marry her when I’m old enough”

"coins pour from hell’s own slot machine into the lap of the world"

"Dali’s goddess of fecundity floats / On the rock of nudity like a pomegranate"

"Welcome home, perfect strangers."

"Mist covers the ocean and beach."

"It is getting late in the world"

"Put all your goals in a box and burn that box."

Who is oppressing you, white man?

"I’d read once that Salinas, the surname that graces every form of my identity, was born in the salt mines of old Spain, where many men surely perished."

"Here, in the hidden life of parking lots."

"The feeling of blood racing rapidly through the veins."

"How do you want to be remembered by your students? And, more importantly, when?"

"My heart is encased in shark teeth, is a rubber shield of death impenetrable"

"Our mutual calamity became the center that holds us together, our scarred and sunken ground zero."

"The part when I speak un poquito Spanish, / But not the part when I can’t understand Grandma"

"The sex robot is accommodating and hints at numbers I stumble over like a teenager running late for class."

"and sometimes writer friends / would quote Kerouac / and his California dispatches"

"In hell the beer is / never cold enough"

"... but instead I rebelled and became a bearded freak in the green mountains of Vermont ... "

"That night I said we could live somewhere / he didn’t have a map to, / but she told me I should leave instead."

"Who doesn't enjoy bubbles ... ?"

"I can’t close the browser window in my brain / long enough to enjoy a blank screen"

"Except the weight of consequence / That has variations of endurance"

"Last night, a boy again, / fell from Ohio’s steamy sky, / shedding his ivory northwest skin"

"I am condescended to / Like a walking diaper / At best, except it’s my head / That’s incontinent."

"moving like trains upon rails of distractions"

"Once it was a gradual thing to leave a place."

"Dolphins don’t have bucket lists."

"That boy played like nothing we could afford. / A hundred-year whiskey on the rocks."

but what you make others see

"Hi, how are you?"

"Daily they carved out a life"

"There must be a 12-step group you could join –I’ll even drive you there – or a therapist who'll help you fill your dog-size void."

"In my son’s wide eyes I can see / the steeple of the church we left / after one too many dirty looks

"does more than look"

"And each time I’m reminded of my age / and that this is how it will be."

-- overheard in an audience

I stand by the window / watching this half-hearted quarantine.

"The trees heard and watched / until I had to be dragged away."

"i’m not deceivedby the brilliance of fall"

"Boy, you can talk."

"One crooked alley morphs silhouettes into drain pipes with / Night, the magician, molding frames"

"And you journey here in couples or groups, / intent on wading out into my waters"

"We keep our distance"

"I dream of your dance with warm nectar / and the frosted hummingbirds buzzing by."

"You will not forget what you were made for, / And you will not ever give up the fight."

"These fopdoodles don’t know diddly-squat."

"She dreams of me in matte"

"I have kept 4/4 time to the river’s current."

"For all gods listening or not"

"I live atop a smoldering volcano, / always rumbling and threatening to erupt."

"it's 7 / a.m. on this fine / sunday morning"