Timeline

1962

As Khrushchev and Kennedy’s waltz picked up a Cuban salsa beat, I was born inhaling the tailwind of a mushroom cloud. I didn’t let anyone sleep.

1966

Love tapped my shoes in ballet class. I followed the teacher’s son across valleys of the moon and began shooting stars from the tips of my fingers.

1972

I no-longer wanted to play with dolls. Mrs. Unruh said I could become an astronaut instead.

1976

It was our nation’s bicentennial. All the cul-de-sac homes had half baths where rose scented soaps rested on white china plates. The fireworks were safe and sane.

1980

I believed I was beautiful. The sun set purple behind a basketball court. I wasn’t alone.

1984

I believed I was smart. Even so I met a man who had serrated teeth and made love with knives.

1986

As he gnawed the remains of my shin bone, the sun filtered orange, red, and purple through pansies blooming light. I didn’t realize it then, but God was keeping watch.

1989

Television waves carried the fall of the Berlin Wall. Worldwide, half moon scars appeared on the forearms of favorite daughters.

1993

My father said the one thing I will always thank him for, “It wasn’t your fault.”

1997

I picked up a pen filled with gunpowder, tears, and the consonance of the letter “s.”

1999

Even though the height of Haight Ashbury was no-longer, Dan played sunrise and sunset on a guitar at the International Café. Left of the moon and under Orion, we hung upside down from trees in Golden Gate Park.

2000

2000 years we’ve been waiting, and still we believe.

2003

Afraid of atomic molecules vibrating free, we were once again a nation of Empire and oil fields burned.

2005

I met a man who kissed my soul and so began many days like this.

2009

“Fine,” he said. “We’re all just fine.” Not better. Not worse. Just as. Still shooting stars from my fingers, I stepped down from the moon and began to cook dinner.

After the Storm

The drought dried lawn

awash in wet. I should

toss seed in bare patches,

fertilize the whole thing,

and keep it watered damp

through to the next rain.

It’s just a weed filled

backyard lawn.

But even there,

molecules stir beneath

and wait for a passing

sky’s thunderous bloom.

Hot off the Press; Draft; Hopefully Enjoy

Iguana Dreams

I have never seen God, the wind or

an iguana sunbathe in the crook of a tree.

Before coming to the United States, Miguel

shot an iguana while riding a jeep with his friends.

I think iguanas might be equivalent to squirrels.

An iguana is a cold blooded

reptile. She spends her time

divided between sun and shade.

We are all in search of balance.

Iguana meat can be broiled, sautéed

or fried. Miguel said he made iguana

stew, then promptly got ill. Something

about temperature and the unforeseen.

The main cause of immigration is economic

with a blended desire to educate one’s children.

Miguel said there were eggs inside.

Where the scars rise on my right ear, I dreamed of placing an iguana tattoo.

Iguana power. Iguana dreams. Green scales

glisten when wet. Those are in the Galapagos.

In Nicaragua, scales twist olive brown.

Both squirrels and iguanas have sharp claws and climb trees.

Somewhere in Texas or Arizona,

there might be one lone tree, a grand

old crotchety oak, with an iguana

in one limb and a squirrel in another.

Latest Poem One

Getting There

Epiphanies arrive in broken colors,

could be starburst, a deep space nebula,

or neurons firing across synapse.

It’s all there: orange slices, the threads

from an embroidered red strawberry,

stains on white pressed cotton.

The moment. The moment from which

to push forward into details of being

a supernova, an interstellar explosion

of dust and gases among stars,

us, inside. Silence. As a little girl,

I sat on a pillow and was good. They stacked

boxes onto a truck. We didn't go to the store. Papi

wasn't with us. I didn’t ask the right

questions. I didn’t know how. Maybe

the cement sidewalk wasn’t that cold. Maybe

I didn’t have to wait that long. Maybe

it was all for the best.

One day we got into a station wagon

and when I woke up,

loneliness began . . .

Never Found


Never found. The moon near midnight.

Fog ridden sails head toward a ramshackle pier.

Water turns still. Never found. White.

Quiet. The wet of approaching evening. Never found

beatific peaceful repose.

An orange rests in a fruit basket. Yellow daisies

drop petals. A glass of water waits.

In the morning. Never found

the same way twice.

One Poem

(Revised 3/22/09)

The Year of the Martini


There was the year of God,
then there was the year of the martini,

a martini finished with four small pimento filled olives.

When all is just too much, when three
more seconds is too long,
when tolerance escapes forgotten,
a martini is what’s called for.

God on the other hand
insists on chattering away about love,
how it’s our destiny, how only
through love we come to understand

how to be kind, merciful, and imagine
a Shiite boy’s shoulder in a bandage.
This boy shakes as he walks with his father
down a street, a street
that for him is an ordinary street,

the street he lives on. God keeps insisting

that we stop, that we stop
being wrong in so many ways: we hurt
those we love,
we hurt those we don’t, we hurt
people on the way home, ordinary

people whose lives we cannot fathom.
We don’t know the sidewalk,
the dirt and cracked cement;
we don’t know the gated fence, the ironwork
and grilled lattices; we don’t know the steps
leading to the front door, the shoes,
the socks, the curled skin of a pinky toe;
we don’t know all that was before

the soldiers came.

One Poem

Winter Cold


It’s not that horrible after sex
conversation when we rationally agree
to get on with our pedantic,
insufferable, ridiculous lives or your boots
clamoring down the steps, the phone
not answered, or the letters written

in a moment to reveal our failure:
how we don’t notice a dandelion
once yellow dormant under snow,
or those birds, those tiny brown
smudges that do not
go South for winter. It’s Elizabeth

at a phone booth calling my mother
for some cash and a cab to a motel
where she will sit within four walls
on the edge of a bed hugging
a poodle. Then Beatrice
not willing to talk. Her sadness sunk

deep into plush wall-to-wall carpeting.
And again those walls, those white
walls that surround your father,
or is it my father, all of us
who need so much more. It’s justified
this feeling of pure terror.

One more time quiet falls white
on an asphalt road, on the hood of cars,
on the path toward my front door.


Note: I found this poem on my harddrive. I wrote it a long time ago in Michigan. It must have been February or March. It was snowing. It was cold.

Three Poems

Nicaraguan Woman



Lupe, Guadalupe, your birthday is today
and I don’t know if I can write this poem
or use your name or tell your story or simply rely
on telling our story, my side, my version
of a walk along the beach in San Francisco,
in July, in the summer, a summer of fog
and overcast skies that do not hold rain,
a continuous wet flow over cars, rooftops, eucalyptus
trees, flowers and asphalt. Over a sand dune
and down to the shoreline we walk
to where water slices into sand, sandcrabs, seagulls,
the seagulls resting on square of vacant beach,
the beach vacant on a mid-summer day.

Both of us a bit after forty, compañeras, and I
think I am like you. Una mujer Latina, una mujer
desplazada, a displaced woman, a bilingual woman.
At times I have considered taking on the term,
Nicaraguan Woman, that which you truly are,
but I am not, no matter how
much I want to belong, to tie in, to say this is
mi pasado. It’s not. I was born here. Having read
Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” and closely
filtered Woody Gutheries’ “This Land is Your Land,”
I believe in the me, in the I, in the most resplendent,
sparkling individualistic pattering of the isolated heart
traversing New York, imagining blue bayous
and the St. Louis arch. Yo soy una gringa
in my appearance, in the way I walk, stand and breathe.

And you tell me your story between water flowing
in and out, carving the shore, the shore disappearing
into the sea. Your story one of near drowning,
in a t-shirt and borrowed shorts, you held on
to a rope, a rope on a slip of a boat rocking through
the Rio Grande to the other side, los Estados Unidos.

Then the heat and three days alongside el coyote
in a desert, jogging in-formation, a steady pace. Pills passed
out, one apple, and the nonstop pounding of your feet.
I ask questions: Did you sleep? Did you eat? Did you have water?
Where you hospitalized? And you reply, the pain
not evident, a simple matter of fact, natural,
so natural that I don’t understand. No, no, no, no.
There were fevers and a doctor at the free clinic,
you explain, antibiotics, and to your toenails
painted a pristine pink, nestled in the wet sand,
you smile and point: Son Americanos. Estos crecieron aquí.


San Francisco



My great-grandmother taught my mother to read using chalk
and a black slate in León where adobe brick
buildings are white-washed Spaniards

and history. We brought with us red and blue macaws, panthers,
and crocodiles. Tooling up and down
Dolores Street hills, my Papi rode

a bicycle delivering Lela's nacatamales. Back and forth
from a clock tower at the end of Market Street,
a renovated 1919 streetcar,

transplanted from Milan, works tourist dollars. Advertisements
from the late sixties posted behind
True View Plexi-glass. I can't read a word

of the European Italian glitz, deep blue of the Mediterranean
and a Coca-Cola, but there is a warm blanket
on a wooden bench and a leather

hand hook. Above a Cuban restaurant, where waiters serve
black bean hummus and chocolate croissants,
hangs the gay pride flag alongside

a Direct TV satellite dish. Gabby walks to school, Pokémon
cards in his pocket. Sanchez Street. I work
in the kitchen with my Lela. Mariposa Avenue,

Valencia Street, Camino Real, are added to masa. Homemade
tortillas puff into sweetness. I'm not
one third Irish, one half German

and two parts English with a little Cherokee thrown in,
but last night I couldn't translate the word “hinge”
on every door that opens and closes

to clouds beyond four walls. An old lady, perhaps Cambodian,
Vietnamese, Korean, something of her own,
hurries off the 31 Stockton while

my Tía Teresa double parks in front of the mercados on 24th street
para los quesos y los chiles in the backroom. One
whiff and the world is not so small.




Red Ants, Black Ants



An ant crawling through tattered books and files
hid under the shelf until I pinched it within
a thin white tissue. It didn't have wings, but
it could have been a termite preparing to bore
into wallboard and chew its way down
the foundation. How strange

the way one ant on a wall next to a nail
comes forth unknown. A harbinger of why
I hate black ants and why Abuelita preserved
the red ones in mason jars. I have trouble
mixing the Wild West with Managua, Nicaragua
1908. Managua had to be green, but the poverty

and isolation of dry desert mesquite, beans
bubbling in an iron pot, fit stories
of hunger. Everyone. My grandmother stole
into the kitchen wearing a white
cotton frock embroidered with pineapples.
It could have been pale blue or yellow.

Definitely sleeveless in that humidity
and heat. Clear night skies are not frozen cold,
but a time when aunts, uncles, cousins and
grandmothers dream without sound.
Iguanas and monkeys. Huge cockroaches
with wings. In the night, a crescent moon would

have been enough for her to reach into a box lined
with wax paper. An iron box. A spicy hunk
of meat in her little scavenging hands
and the ants. The red ants biting her tongue.
Why do we love our families so much?
I had a hammer and nails. A piece of plywood.

I was determined to pound straight and true
under a Los Angeles sun and Abuelita's tomatoes,
five pearly bushes six feet tall. Green in arid
desert heat. From the garden hose water
came out hot and splashed to dry dust. I sat
on clumps of grass, the board between my legs.

The nails wouldn't stay straight! They flopped
over as the hammer hit the head. It was hot
and I was sweaty, dirty and crying. Those damn
nails! And the ants crawling on my sneakers,
in my sock, up my leg! I'm sure she came out
and wiped me off; had me blow my nose

and gave me a piece of pie. It wasn't pie.
It was torta. Out of a mix, but changed. An extra
egg. Whole milk. Los Angeles. Managua.
Verdant green mangroves and tile roofs.