New Mexico Mercury

Weekly Poem: Midwest Ranchera

Thursdays, the devil danced at the Black Saddle, cloven
hooves tracking dust for later evidence. He drove a black

Mercury with suicide doors and flames flickering the fins.
Sometimes he slid from the door with his tail forking long

and taut to the floor. Hot-tongued, he would say, Do you
want to touch it? And who didn’t want to touch that tail?...

Weekly Poem: Hot Tub Time Machine

There’s a place
just beyond the present,
where the past goes to die
in the name of progress.

Where prayers
become quaint folks songs,
instead of blueprints,
instead of sheet music to the revolution,
instead of the past words
to our next donut round the sun...

Weekly Poem: GRAMMAR LESSON EIGHT—Chapter Four: Nouns (Gerunds)

Verbs always push around
the nouns of this life

always doing stuff
we think of usually
as verbs

as actions—the word actions
a noun when verbs be-
come nouns when I sojourn forth
becomes sojourning
the fact that the sojourn journeys
forth into this darkness...

Weekly Poem: my mother

my mother once told me
through the smoky air of our living room
after a long drag and a long drink
“the women in our family have been
known to bring out the worst in men”...

Weekly Poem: Pasqual

His teeth are like a row of stumpy razors, and his black hair has a sheen like the sun on black
coral. He drinks Diet Coke instead of the filtered rainwater preferred by the Progressives, who
incidentally make him very nervous.

"What bills are you going to steal from me today, young man?" he teases me on the House
Floor.

Walking slowly, with the deliberation of a champion mule, his decades of office passing like so
many forgotten arguments. That quizzical look that he always gives me, impossible to read...

Weekly Poem: Georgia at ‘The Black Place’

I sit
between black lava and ash

dust-brushed and shaken
amid suggestion of bone

in the curve of the place without sky

rose-lipped clouds beneath...

Weekly Poem: City Life

Bent screws.
Yard bricks displaced.
Wooden fence posts splintered.
A late night car hopped the curb,
ramped up my neighbor's driveway
and took out the corner of our fence.
 
A short fence, anyone could step over it with almost no effort,
but it kept people out,
kept us safe from bums,
random drunks, and passers through
that call this part of the city home
too...

Weekly Poem: The Girl in Her Head

This time she is in front of the mirror
plucking at the few white eyelashes growing
among the other dark ones, above one eye
only.  She wears a long grey robe, her hair
pulled off her face, she wonders if she never
moved from in front of this mirror would there
be a point when she stopped seeing this self
or another self...

Weekly Poem: Archeology

We turned our backs & spit
out the medicine of salvation.
We let the sun melt us in a
sweet conspiracy of heat.

Liquefied, we seeped
under white, alkaline soil
& shrugged when wagon
train wheels rolled over us...

Weekly Poem: Word Problems

One man, who is an artist, has two dreams and four children. The first dream of the artist is the multiplication of their dreams by an exponential factor of infinity. If each of these children are a brush and the artist has only one canvas, how much paint will he need to pigment a sky big enough...