Southern Legitimacy Statement: Well, let’s begin with: I wrote all of these poems when living south of the border, far south–as in Guatemala. Hope that legitimizes me. If not, let me say that I taught at McNeese State University for a bit in another life and/or that I spent 20+ winters in Florida.
Nothing Says and other poems
Nothing Says
get thee gone dear stranger
like double-rolled electrified razor wire
hidden by bougainvillea
like the vicious teeth
of ten thousand Shangri-La
and India Quiché bottles
half-buried in Quickset
atop twelve foot compound walls
like steel-cased
foot thick mahogany courtyard doors
like Guatemalan Bull Terriers
bred for certain anarchy
like pump rifles slung
by the habitually unemployed
stationed as guards
outside bakeries and barbershops
like reports of carjackings
on cobbled streets
by citizen security squads
like clouds of bandito gossip
leaking from expat haunts
from online reviews
from gringo transients who have done better
staying back home
Ode to Concrete
Silica limestone indigenous clay
a thousand thousand fossil shells
yard-poured
or bag-humped from flatbeds
from openhanded forklifts
from the trunks
of bottom-out lastminute
on-call delivery sedans
Hose-watered
Shovel-mixed
Barrel-rolled on the roadside
Hodded
through baffling scaffold
Married to rebar
Slurried into compound walls
Snaked into molds
into banquettes and livestock troughs
into baptismal fonts
Slathered as stucco
Stained layered stippled stamped
Rough dressed or tickled into mighty art
Ode to Detours and Barricades
Oh to serve as a traffic volunteer
to control neighborhood throughput
down serpentine lanes
to redirect the zigzag
and pell-mell
of overflow trucks and busses
in search of that perfect shortcut
to kneel with your crew
over cinnamon steam
bowls of atol de elote
breakfast
in the shade
of hand-poured bollards
cement pyramids
dangling
from scrapwood scaffolds
before they are set
before they begin to enrage
the gravel and dust spitters
the headlong hurtlers the nosethumbers
the double skidmark birdflippers
