Three Poems
A 4th of July in Rosarito
The sun has an extra weight,
a hammer that falls like hurricane
when we make the sky quake
at least once per year. But now
driven shotgun beyond border, those blasts
push short of quiet sea under-construction homes,
stairs rising from beach sand
to landings without doors.
Men tar a ply roof. One is learning
an apathy, and sings for bother.
All the kelp on water’s ceiling
breaks in a cove by Calafia,
a bust of a bald man faces a window
like he’s excited by extinction’s threat,
some iron fire out in the east, a Jesus
down the road looking down the road.
Artifacts in the Alley
It doesn’t have to be all dumpsters and rubble.
I found a series of staircases in flight
toward attic cloud, an opening
where the air’s thinner,
a reservoir in the gait, the volume
of sweat we expect a title to hold.
Level these with me: the claims
to land, signatures in shoveled stone
stacked against nature, pulverized
to the gravel by decades’ pressure.
I could hear you through any garden,
a bear learning to play the tuba.
Trash truck shifts to the beep beep reverse
off the black/blue/green bins. Window bars
make a glockenspiel built with plates of one note:
a consistent dense mass to chime
the song we’ll hear as a wandering march.
We Used to Play Instruments
Everyone wants a soft voice
in a heavy piano mallet salad,
a study of sound’s repetitive joy.
You’ve forgotten modes & arpeggio joys,
my fingers hold strings ragged
and everyone wants soft voices.
To listen as a clear choice
burrow in sound of banger or ballad,
a study of sound’s repetitive joy.
My own melody is a sloppy patois
wandering, like forgotten language, pallid.
Everyone wants a soft voice.
Sheet music is beautiful but annoys
like we’re murmuring Hebrew, DOS, or Latin,
a study of repeated sounds unvoiced.
Last night we dreamed of Illinois
and a whole alphabet planted
every once-wanted soft voice,
study of repeated sounds rejoiced.
- Three Poems - January 8, 2026
* This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are producs of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
