Rihanna always has a song
on the charts. Lava hair, baggy

denim, Keith Haring—it’s often easy
to think she’ll always be there, like

Michael Jackson and frequent texts I recite
to friends, who avalanche aww he’s a keeper.

Feelings are neither created nor destroyed
but conserve over time, like fame it’s to-

tally a physical law, I remind myself
when the text says “seeing someone else.”

I’m starting to have an eye
on the makings of dry skin.
Impulse aisle induced psych-

osis— Bikini magazine ice cream
schism. Seriously, fuck magic
bullet thinking. Too much credit

is given the panic of “self-control.”
Hard work is hard, but decisions,
like metaphors, are built within

a moat of desire. Love in a hopeless
kingdom. It’s like, sugar and booze feel
good then bad, sometimes real bad,

but art feels bad before it feels
even worse, and then even the best
and I just want to wear a pretty dress.

1. My mother was voted “best legs” in her senior high school yearbook, despite the fact that she was also student body president and editor-in-chief of the school paper. Only boys got things like, “most likely to succeed.”

2. They say Indians are predisposed to a lot, like alcoholism and diabetes. In the clinic, patient history starts the first time you get sick. They ask me why don’t I eat, nearly commit me when I say because my great grandfather’s horses were stolen in 1890.

3. We are so much more than we think.

4. Thinking all the time vs seven hickeys on my neck and shoulders, and the bite marks on your arm.

5. There must be a word for this in French, for looking down at your hands and seeing dad.

The art of singing isn’t hard to master.
So many words seem filled with the intent
to be sung that their song is no disaster.

Sing something everyday. Accept the fluster
of forgotten lyrics, the breath badly spent.
The art of singing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice singing higher, singing faster:
posture, intercostals, the lifted diaphragm
and soft palate. None of these will bring disaster.

I’ve lost my voice. And look! My last and
next to last karaoke songs went bad.
The art of singing isn’t hard to master.

I’ve lost the key, and overtones, and vaster—
strain my throat, raise shoulders, dry mouth.
I miss notes, but it isn’t a disaster.

—Even hearing it back (the recorder, a horror
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of singing isn’t hard to master
though it may sound like (sing it!) like disaster.

I found the sentance haunting,
until i realized he meant the band

Phish.
Then, I had other questions.

I/they/you/we/re/still fuck/ing/fucking
fighting/to silence. I/H/e interchange/s/
voices/tone/s/inflect/ions all morn/ing
/night/(mindfight)/once/you/ve/he/s/left
try/to chang/e/the/complicating/trajectory
o/f/ our arg/argu/ment/(s)

me reading my poem “Buy Me a Donut and Take Me to a Museum” in a sunbeam

Simon says take a shot
everytime the man on TV says “ummmm.”

Says ice cream is best when cinnamon
bun. Simon says give up

the diet just for tonight come on. Simon says
but it’s my birthday. Says salt

on the rim. Simon says on the rocks
no condom. Simon says break-

fast makes you more hungry. Simon is a little
hungover. A little ash in the cup

makes you drunker. Simon says coffee
and a smoke. Simon asks if they’re real

gold. Simon says swipe—credit don’t matter!
Simon says make it a double. Super

size that! Beer batter! Simon says he likes
you, but. Simon says quit tomorrow and

2morrow 2morrow eat french learn kale Mean
while, he says, tilt-a-whirl. Get the spins gale-

force winds. Touch yr toes. Simon says touch
yr toes. Says power of suggestion. Throws

up, throes of habit.

Life is waves. Waves

create a craving for Dr. Pepper,
something sweet after salty somersaults that get water in yr inner
ear, and deft kelp evasion, and hours and hours
coaxing friends deeper in but they never want to go out as far as you—
past the point of wave-beaten, past the point
of even being subject to waves,
where the huddled ocean cups you and blows like soup.
Some diagnoses require a different type of medicine,
like shots of expensive silver tequila reminiscent of beach sand
or smooth pie crust like a desert island
which may just be the proven psychological tide of butter,
but what’s the difference?
Life is waves.

In terms of spectral dynamics,
and guitar riffs, and ambulance sirens
and your “type” of guy, which is basically any pipe
cleaner over 6’2— who all eventually say move
on— and especially with tattoo
pain and the nerve death before a root
canal, or calls from the reservation
to say someone else is in the hospital or passed
on, and sudden 98 degree days when you jet to meet
one of yr gentlemen jetties but forget to signal
into the fast lane on the freeway and the SUV next to you crashes
into the divider and rolls and you had summer school
with him—
life is waves.

But to a lesser extent,
how about kneeling
close to shore, or sitting down
in small sharp waves. The breakers
fill your mouth like salty chocolates.

Do I know him from porn
is a thing I think at gay bars

or from some internet profile
while waiting in the bathroom line

which is, I guess, the same thing
swiping alive my phone to avoid eye contact

maybe from reality TV
even though I’m trying not to eat

or some sloppy hook-up when I first
so much electricity

moved to the city.

1.
We must wear: something
from a first haircut,
something almost ball
lightning, something evil
eye, something returned empty
at midnight

2.
The heart should be an empty rocking
chair, pointed infinitely near
as diamonds

3.
We remember good
glitter protects the house
from cold, wet
crickets

4.
To sit

with a high
wish
laces an albatross across
the mind

5.
We sway true at the window,
despite the open sky’s
furtive shiver

6.
We float
face down above reproach,
ornamental
as an opal makes a happy grave

7.
We rub gold young and some-
where a spoon reflects
the pure pond bottom

8.
Our nails make a parcel appearance,
like the borrowed ears of new company.

9.
We smell a warm, forked cure
rendered from the gall
of public society

10.
We will bring you a bone
and pull it clean as the veil
when a dog howls

11.
We wish out of the bow,
to a ribbons shadow passing
over the water

12.
We blow out death
to baby’s breath—
the art of rain entertaining
dandelions

13.
We are over gold
luck, and vampires
on birthday cake
or open-mouthed insistence
on a wish under clover

10 Words to try and work into poems this week:

Sticky

Bristle

Bulb

Ravel

Gall

Open-mouthed

Sway

Clink

Null

Blotch

We’re at a party. We sit across a kitchen table getting hot drinking from the bottle. You reach for my arm, say I’ve drifted off and ask me what I’m thinking. My grandmother was taken away from the reservation as a child, and they cut her hair and forbade her from speaking Kumeyaay. They only sent her home because she stopped eating. Reservation kid Ghandi.

One night she stole an onion from one of the nuns and said it was the sweetest thing she’d ever tasted.

I’m forgetting something. You keep saying fence hopping things.

We are chemists, but it’s not a science. This is the feeling of skipping a meal. You are a chemist because you reach for the bottle but its only me and I feel the conversion of matter into radiant energy. Then he leaves.

There are moments we wake up like latches. For lack of better words, this is like a “meal” coming “true,” pressing into each other like we alloy. I mean allay. I mean I might lie. Your arms cross mine like a stitch. There’s too much mixing in this line, alluvial like a drying riverbed that became a major scientific discovery.

My grandmother dreamed of Tin Pan Alley, and sold a song once with the chorus “Your Kisses Drop Like Atom Bombs.” It was her meal becoming Sand Creek.

There’s this idea of the way things are “supposed” to be, that you weaned from me. Hunger rumbles like distant mushrooms. This is what it’s like to hear me thinking.

At one point, there was a point.

The air was still, I think. The sky was yellow at dusk and we were like cameos, flushed against the mountains.

Then there was lots of stuff. Like identifying with pinole, and finding someone.

The boom ended. Money dried up with the creek bed, and the very best citizens of San Diego called it “deluded sentimentality” to give Indians any land or water. As if these things are stuff to be owned or sold off. I am missing many cousins, have you seen them?

I give you clothes, jewels, I give you hair, my hair, I put things on you. Lots of things, stuff. Spliff. Paycheck. Love.

Have you ever wanted the flip-flopper to hold you, and shatter loose? To bruise by kissing, I think this is called hickey. Then he always leaves me.

There was an orchard in the valley. Sand Creek was shrinking. This is all very blurry to me. Candelaria gathered wild foods from the hills and woods. She tamed the intrusion of Spanish crafts, made pinole— a blend of native seeds and Spanish barley. She churned butter, and made lace. She ground acorn in ancient metates and wove baskets from dry grasses.

Can you see how I always feel like I’ve been left? I’m culturally sensitive to “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow.”

Maybe if we’d waited til summer, you would have been warmer. Maybe no one can keep that dream-feeling for long.

Let’s play a game.

Let’s say southern California’s water is oil. Haliburton is the San Diego Flume company, and I am descended from a long line of wild fires. I mean tribal leaders.

Somehow I’m very suspicious. My back hurts. I’ve learned amnesia is a foregone conclusion.

I’m forgetting something.

The Cuyamaca Flume transported mountain runoff and river water the 33 miles from my reservation to downtown San Diego. Its construction began illegally, in secret, in the 1880s.

I’m missing many cousins, have you seen them?

Ventura kept horses. He used them to ferry Indian people across the county’s mountain trails, like our reservation’s first taxi driver. You could say that, like his father, Ventura had a flock. They both went on to become “captains,” or chiefs.

Sometime much later comes me.