I never saw so many frogs;
You didn’t either. We walked
the tracks, sometimes stepping
from tie to tie, sometimes
walking the rail–holding
our hands out as if
for balance. It was all show.
Our balance was never
in question. Besides the danger
ran in the other direction,
along the bridge. We
could look down, almost dizzy,
and see the river. But even there,
we didn’t need our [...]
Dusted red stone
wrapped in gray deluge
yields greened cliffs shimmering
like an unearthly vision
in sunshine’s morning haze.
Silver gray brush bears yellow blossom cascades.
Stands of ocotillo—no longer barren,
barricaded with thorns—
blush tiny green leaves until
burnt orange petals burst from their fingertips.
Drying mesquite scents air
alive with the rush of rabbits, cooing doves,
the hawk’s hunting cry, coyotes’ eerie babble,
silent lizards thawing [...]
Driving to the top
of Little Pine Creek Canyon,
I see how the reservoir fares,
how deeply it curves
against hand-mortared stone.
Home for spring break,
I’d overheard
that it’s filling up good this year.
(Was it at Terry’s Merc?
Or at the Relief Society Birthday Ball
where I watched a former cheerleader
dance in maternity clothes?)
No matter.
It’s enough to watch
water swell like metaphor
while I remember
that [...]
you rustle me as long grass,
stirring and scattering
me to grow
in places where I otherwise
would not.
I want to grow a garden for you,
to teach you the beauty of your
nurturing,
to put in colors and leaves and
petals and
fibers
the sunlight-directedness that from
you I have learned,
that perhaps,
when your roots are plucked
and your flowering withered,
you may look to me,
remember the springtime,
and [...]
I was getting cold feeling bored going down the road again
This was yesterday
But I like to use the past simple tense so it looks even further away
So I told my girlfriend
I think I’m going through a brand new crisis
What crisis?
She sat up and smiled as wide as she could
That kind of crisis, you know
That kind [...]
Under these clouds the earth
Has raised a monument
To herself, tier by tier, a replica
Of the stone beneath my feet.
I am stone, too–stone
And one hot wick of life
Fusing me to the first generation,
Flaring forward from me to the last.
Stone, thread, and rain
One March, Grandfather held
A forked stick by the prongs
And walked slowly back and forth
Across the [...]
Haere mai:
I’ve anticipated your soul-deep
craw. Stewed pork bones and potatoes
to tender verging on cream. Sent the kids,
brown bodies sliding between the breeze,
to gather more puha from the fenceline.
Sonchus oleraceus: slides from the tongue
into the boil just long enough to soften
the cellulose, give the broth enough bite
to open the palate, throw windows wide
on sense. To bathe [...]
Sitting cross-legged beneath the cherry tree,
wearing her mother’s seed pearl necklace
and a sprig of jasmine on her bodice—
she offers blossoms to a gravestone.
The gilt and gold of late afternoon washes
through shadows. It’s springtime. Unripened
fruit hangs like quiet temple bells between
flowering cylinders of white, and brides
with dark branches. Somewhere in the sweet alone,
silence caps hilltops and [...]
Storm in these hills
frays each edge
of symmetry: shadow-snow
drawn under earth and stone
by threaded rain.
Bone-red willows
banked by sage
tangle cold echoes,
sharing the motion
of water turned wind
in search for transparent green.
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Nani Lii S. Furse is a SAHM, proof that she’s learning textese in an effort to communicate with her teens and young adult children. She earned a [...]
I slip outside into a corridor of clarity and breeze—
that pinking time when owls home to barns, when bats
fold their hunger into gloves of sleep and cranes
whoop in the morning like freckled boys on stilts.
One body: some days, I swear, one is almost enough.
But today? I want to climb free of this narcotic dark,
squeeze into [...]