My Steampunked Universe
When I plop the universe down like a freshwater catch onto my kitchen counter, I shimmy in an engine piston now driving an expanding cylinder: the host to glass galaxies, […]
Back From Surgery
When butterfly stitches flap across my chest in our San Francisco bedroom, you touch fresh wings after a chrysalis of cancer got sliced out. In fourteen solar dips, […]
You’re Guilty of Being a Woman
when you drag the womb of your womanhood down the Gratification Aisle. You pick a price-slashed clitoris since the one Ma gave you got kicked in the […]
Laika
Published in The Cosmos is Alive (Kelsay Books, 2023)
In the Smoke
“The Camp Fire started on Thursday, November 8, 2018, in Northern California’s Butte County . . . an urban firestorm formed in the foothill town of Paradise.” “Remembering the Camp […]
Mutant
Published in Speculative City: Issue 6 Industry (2020) and Still Human (Falkenberg Press, 2025)
Skull Walk
Coyote shambles north along San Pablo Avenue. At the West MacArthur Boulevard intersection, he trips over a skull. “Oakland, what is this white sphere my paw crushed a hole through?” […]
East Bay Seed
When the rat climbing up the wall makes a seedy flower go bloom, my organs rearrange themselves in frightful frenzy. Rat fur does that to my nervous system. It’s […]
Stray
When a stray bullet is a stray dog, a stray dog barks within a chamber of anger before runaway legs unhinge themselves from a gun’s steel ownership to […]
Sister Hunting
When the Sunday morning sun hands out sunburns like maternity ward newborns, I sprint through that neonate heat. At the junction of Love & Am I Alive, I […]