I walk along dusty streets at the base of the Verdugo Mountains just north of Los Angeles, my gaze fixed upon the jagged horizon, where an angry orange line burns, jumping and snapping, devouring brush and charring the landscape. Last night, shifting winds pushed wildfire over the canyon close to my home, the one I share with my husband and our daughter, who, like the city, is named after angels.

in her mouth, a song picked up at the company store

the cocooned hidden heart hanging

There are no arrival cards to scribble in, no scanner for my fingerprints. Just two ladies at a desk. One asks the questions, the other stamps passports. The questioner wants to know if I'm here “on business.”

When I mention how I don’t want to think about last winter, my husband says, “Why, what happened last winter?”

did they forget / the vibration / of our throats / humming / in the shade?

The #MeToo movement sweeps through the academy, then through American Buddhism, and back.

I moved back to my hometown in rural Ohio in the dead of winter, intent upon making the best of things at a time when only the worst things seemed to be happening. It was a dreadful February of oxygen tanks, life-thieving coughing fits, bedside vigils, and late-night weeping in the darkened room where my grandfather lay dying.

Every time they got together, it was like this. The sister would go and visit the brother in their hometown, or the brother would come and see the sister in her college town.

O sleepless wives of Mount Sinai, do you fear your dangerous proximity to the sun?

In the dream I bury my father in the swamps of Florida, that empire of shithead tourists.

O father, O hunter, bury me in the casket of your eye. Tonight I sleep against a pile of survey stakes

Zoning tape and timber ruins in a landscape: how pretty goes the night, how pretty go the stars like a thousand cigarettes thrown from the hand of a diesel truck driver speeding down one of America’s gutted highways.

If there is one thing that has always stood in the way of my father and me being friends, it is distance, and if there is one thing that has always brought us back together, it is movies. Even when we lived in the same house, I mostly saw my father on the weekends.

Orange [a president...
…and now a vice-president
who just got the taste of segregation
out of his mouth after fifty years
sweeps through South Carolina

I’m as black as they
I’m your trophy
above the mantle

I know it’s unfathomable to see
after the way we’ve anointed him
patron saint of peace
prophet of nonviolence

The notice came in the mail on Tuesday, but it remained sitting beside the refrigerator, resting, ignored, like a piece of partly burned cake.

like the mushroom cloud
that follows mankinds’ greatest foible
all the rouge neutrons
the atomic sun abomination

The viper pit discovers its arms,
slaps and grabs. Sibilant lout-suave words. Once, Haze got moccasin-bit
as a child—she still tastes venom in her mouth