I am honored to have my poem “How to Build Your Own” included in the “Hot Water” issue of the literary journal Free the Verse.

You can read the poem here.

When the French Canadian groundhog
died while hibernating in its den,
its unseen shadow slipped
into the winter night

without a sound.
Then mine and yours
disappear too
into a shroud of clouds

blanketing a stretch
of overcast days.
In the vicinity
of a half-frozen lake,

giddy shouts echo
from a grove
of nearly bare
tamarack trees.

A few stubborn
golden needles
dangle from branches
above a cluster of wild

shadows

detached from their objects.
Finally the subjects
of their own stories,
they cut a hole in the ice

to make a swimming trough.
Diving into the darkness,
they create their own action
without having to tend

to the reaction.
Let them
have their moment,
you whisper.

Mostly human
silhouettes (and one or two
with tails) dart in
and out of the water.

Just as dusk descends, I turn off
all the lights, switch on
my rust-

colored Italian table lamp
to the lowest level
of warm glow.

It whispers to me:
“Let me shift
your mood to one of calm

that breeds trust.”

“How?” I ask. Silence.
The room still. Music
no longer lulling me

into a false sense
of urgency. Angry voices
in my head come unplugged.

My crepuscular fingers float
to the smooth surface before me.
Words with no ulterior motive

flicker as reflections
on the nearby bookcase.
Beautifully illegible.

Nothing more needs to be
said. The night is fully
charged. The dead cougar’s body

is being stuffed and will be
on display soon to educate us all
about happier endings

without SUVs on highways
or territory loss.
It will snow again.

I only want
to experience
it

one more time
the way I did
when I was 14.

The way I loved
merry-go-rounds
as a small child.

More! More! Before
I became so desperate
to jump off, utterly unable

to let go
of the horse. The one I rode
for over two decades

was all glass
and Polish vodka bottle shaped.
The more I loved it

as it galloped me
on water-worn limbs
further into the dark

spiral in the center
of everything, the more
I needed to ride it

till I ground its legs
down to their silica
granules of origin.

And that spot behind
the beach cottage garage
among the ripening

rose hips where those handmade
cedar shingle swings hung
from the sky—one for each

of us three girls.
That’s where I learned
the whole purpose of a swing

is to get higher

and higher.

It’s never enough. Whisper
euphoric recall into the ear
of another conch shell

as we stand, feet safely secured
in the sand,
till the next storm

washes it all
away. And then we do it
all over again

with the ruined beauty
of the dunes
our relentless guide.

I see you are wearing
your polka dot dress tonight.
I’m wearing mine too.

See.

Sometimes I forget to zip
up all the way.
Does that happen to you too?

I see you enjoy the dirty,
the dilapidated, the peeled.
Me too. Me too.

Did you suck your thumb
as a child? I never stopped.
And now I’m dead.

Correction. My creator that is.
I am very much a living work of art,
nearly 50 years old.

I see you know how
old buildings speak
while camouflaging what disturbs

us deep inside. When I cover
my mouth with my fingers like this,
everyone thinks I’m ashamed.

You and I know better.
How smiles and frowns begin
the same way. Lips bow up and down

veiled or not.
I am a cheetah.
Are you one too?

I will be a leopard
tomorrow. How about you?
They call us spotted

hyenas. You and I
know better—the laughter
the hand conceals.

As you wait for floating
islands to salvage the little lake
sandwiched between an interstate
and a parkway. As you wait

for the day
to mature enough to collect

larch cones in the north garden
before it snows. As you wait
for salt
from the closest marsh

to thicken. As you wait to see
the occasional island

lose its independence
again. And for the coffee
to kick in and lead you
to the secret drawbridge

covering the breach
till next time. As you wait

for the lighthouse keeper
to wave back. The startling
sound of a shoal beneath.
As you wait to land

in the fog
and for us to begin.

All this time, you thought I was someone
else. Precious cargo and
a grove of tamarack trees nowhere
near where you run under the overpass.

This migraine, those stories, your character
wiped clean. The tension in those clenched-jaw
details once visible on the pavement.
This is no protest—

this ghost of a voice
in you trickles out. You think you see
the moon again before dawn.
Now that we’ve been reacquainted,

you will meet your own
handwriting next and skip every other
line to become the fragmented fragrance
I always dreamed you could be.

When someone covers Bowie’s “Heroes,”
and you see the road not taken,
and the horizon weaves its jagged way
behind a row of broken empty bottles, and,

oh, I know
I am so vain, and
we’re all just pushing each other
away, and that’s it.

Because no one questions why
she runs circles around a parking lot

to get another glimpse
of the albino squirrel.

Because a mysterious catlike creature
with a raccoon tail darts between cars

on a moving freight train, flies
across the trail into the woods.

And with the Washington Monument
in the distance, she asks a stranger:

How worried should we be?

And the dead bee
on the windowsill.

Because she can’t remember
whose father burned hedges

with a torch that was more
flashlight, less spark.

Because we wobbled, and they
were waiting for us. And some other

hero flies so high into the cotton
ball clouds without wings

to weigh him down. Because she searches
for a loophole in the pergola

where logic has been flattened

into nitro cold brew cans
waiting to be recycled.

And his arrival time has changed.
Because he’s due to invade

her mind in three hours—not two.
And reshaping brows of mountains

into 45-degree angles
does not equal the distance

traveled to reach the light
the night before he died.

Because it’s not what she thought
it would look like. Because a man

tells his lover he’s going
to take more pictures. Because

their eyes were lit from within.
And all the saints were wearing

the same international orange robes
with black silk sashes. And

it’s almost as if the morning could
calm phantom desire.

And because she says she belongs
to it.

When she maps a route through
the labyrinth with a wand
she found buried in the dirt

beneath a copse of brilliant
yellow tamarack trees.

When it’s all so risky:
the robot that drags
the river that floods

then dries up that comes
before down that drink

before anyone sees
that a telescope is not
going to bring the island

back to her now
that everyone wants to leave

this wrecked domain, rock
smashing through
its own orbit.

When it’s loyalty,
or fear, that keeps her

standing inside this cube
with glass hatches. She asks
if she can bring

her guitar to comfort
the prairie. When silence answers

in the way only silence can.

She frees herself
of the final memory,

gets in the car, drives off.
When no one stops her—
the hatch-lined sketch tucked

inside the island’s chalk outline
least of all. She’s gonna give

the real ones away.
When we all believed
California was an island.