Poetry

A week after the Apollo 11 landing,  I sip a fresh pour of coffee before my scrambled eggs and toast   among a line of Saturday customers at the shared […]

I slurp coffee with cream on a Lake Merritt bench across from waters flowing like imported coffee  into commuting mouths.   Shit. Underpaid or unpaid hands  surely plucked these Columbian […]

Our eyes snap open  into the shards of a shattered night after sleep nested on our branch bodies. Outside our open  bedroom glass, Black-Crowned Night-Herons sleep in their familial nest. […]

Beside lapping water, I wander on Lakeshore Avenue.   When a leashed  Golden Retriever yelps,  I’m startled out of my stupor    in a black pool between lampposts aglow.   […]

You tumble out of Montgomery BART.  Up up. Skyscrapers bully your downtown eyes where lofting steel slides into the keyhole of San Francisco fog.   Wait you think: who’s this […]

After a string of in-heat dog days, the sky unlatches their cloud gate,   lets loose a raining kennel  of cats and dogs clawing my face raw.   I sprint through this […]

Through my living room window, I spot a peacock resident prowling Occidental and 61st Street yet they don’t pay a mortgage or buy a $7 mocha latte.   I must […]

We walk in May Day sunlight where Menace barks at a bulldog chained behind a fence at the bent junction of Market and 35th. I pet my twelve-year-old poodle mix. […]

I lie on my queen bed or do I lay with my queen? Does my bedroom monarch lay or lie on me? As a monarch butterfly perches on my kingly […]

The first time I lied to our daughter, I declared “you can do whatever a man does.” Words shot out like a pressurized sprinkler onto her freshly formed frame. The […]