Do you know your lips never changed?
Here beneath the Padernal
the vistas are the color of your skin—
not like the stark Black Place
whose charcoaled depths you sketched,
but pastel hues of cool salmon pink.
dust devils
a haunting song
from the cow’s skull
Would it shock you to learn
I have run my hands through all your smocks
within the museum’s archives?
I even lifted something light, alive,
so worn and caked in cotton sweat,
and smelled you, musk and all.
growing wild
on an adobe wall
green chiles
I could have fallen for you,
would have scaled a thousand cliffs
to gaze into those water-colored eyes.
Even now, when you come to me at dawn
and wake me with the brush-stroke of a kiss,
I open like an iris.
single cot
a hollow in the mattress
still warm
is the author of Lessons for Tangueros (poetry), Marcel Malone
(novel), and Tick Tock (haibun collection). His haibun have been widely
published and anthologized, and in 2019 he was elected into the New Resonance
community of haiku poets. Originally from Wales, he now lives in Chicago, USA.
