Farmers’ Market Straw baskets in tow,I arrive on Carillo Street,in a sort of walking meditationas if part of a sacred Ashram—a coming together of kindred spirits.  I look forward to my Saturday morning ritual,a sensory self-care experience lifting me from a secluded writer’s life. Pridefully, the berry boy organizes my baskets, as he flirts with young and old.The farmer’s wife offers slicesof sun-warmed peaches to the passing crowd. Date displays—hard and soft.Two hippies in their boothrearranging avocadoes like teachers align children in schoolyards.Dusted with earth’s perfume,carrots, stacked for pickings. Between booths, a braided blonde adolescent strums her guitar—her coffee tin brims with bills—while an unhoused manoffers jokes for a dimeas a balloon man blows exotic…

Easter Sunday 1962 All the Chevy gauges brokenbut Dad’s uncanny sense of speed speeds us along.His starched shirt pitted the color of exhausted Lent.Mom’s chapel hanky bobby pinned. I drum on the back of her seat.Eyes narrow in the rearview mirror as Dad’s foot hovers over the brake.No seatbelts to hold us down or back. And the fixed gaze from the metal dash– a magnetic resin Christ, arms outstretched. All four windows cranked open.Vent wings jutting out like elbows. No need for heating. No AC to turn on.From the backseat my older brother tugs at his clip-on tie.My hand out the window dives and risescurved like an airfoil. David A.…

Odd True Fact after Jennifer Martelli Weeks after you died, a song sparrow arrivedby mail, small collector’s card from a seriesmade by Arm & Hammer, with cleaning tips on its back. A poet sent it. She said it remindedher of you. By a kind of transference, it does metoo. It’s perched by that silly picture of you, mouth agape in a laughing howl, drying your hairone night in our MFA dorms before the midtermdance. Recently, I heard the Talking Heads in the local coffee shop. Sharp as a knife, factscut a hole in us. Back I went to that awful gymwith the lights out, all of us hopping and grinding…

Once Again, Explaining a Father to a Son On the surface, to put it simply,he is a man who understands garbage cans.And yes, he gets on your caseabout taking out the trashand he believes in breaking down boxeslike Lions on Sunday.But to me, what I want you to see is thathe is a certain type of undertakerin his ability to immerse himselfin the world we all want to avoid. He is a man who helped me when I wasknee-deep in my own garbage.Who hauled load after load withouta word of judgement.Who did not turn and runat the smell of my sour pastmy rotting regretsor my moldy mistakes.He simply showed up…

Lavender Forget about the airplanes, love.There are no airplanes. There is onlylavender, the significance of lavender.Astride a marble lion a baronnessbrushes her hair in the lavender.Under the soft & daffodillian lampsthe snowmelt writes its book of lavender.Forget the airplanes, their convenientpallbearing, their insistence on distancesdiscredited by lavender. We are drawntogether by strings of stone,we are drawn by hand, by the handof a drawer made entirely of lavender.The letters we wrote are dust-in-a-hutchwherein we described ourselvesto each other like machinesagainst the lavender. A weaver sitsat his airplaneloom & weaves the airinto airplanes. It is none of our concern.Our concern is lavender. Can you feelmy fingers in your hair when I brush…

Introduced by Heather Sellers Florida-based poet Avni Vyas is intellectually playful, wildly associative, mythic, and often very funny. She has a particular gift for putting things that don’t ordinarily belong together into the same imaginative field: science and mythology, Florida wildlife and Hindu gods, pop culture and metaphysics, eros and botany, jokes and profound loss. “The Goddess Saraswati in Chemistry Class” is essentially a poem about the failure of these categories. The speaker is sixteen, caught between scientific taxonomy and erotic perception, and the poem keeps collapsing the two. Biology isn’t just biology. A teacher isn’t just a teacher. A flower isn’t just a flower. Scientific observation isn’t separate from erotic observation.…

Driving to the South Rim (for C.) Ponderosa, you said, when I asked what kind— those pines off 180 West near Flagstaff dying from the bottom up. A brush fire, you said— see how it charred one side of the road, as opposed to a tree fire roaring over the canopy— then we top the rise and everything on both sides is gone: pine, aspen, trees we can’t name, skeletal remains, and just like that, who we are is reconfigured, 50-ish miles from the South Rim, our last-minute diversion after a cancelled flight, when milky-white windmills come into view, a foreign sight to this lifelong Floridian, and I’d like to…

Poem Ending in a Psalm And then I see the gardeners’ heap of mulch      as tall as a sapling olive tree,  wide as a creek bed,      a mountain of leavings at the head of the near row        in the lemon orchard—    mowed clover, wood chips, sticks and stems, oak leaves, sweetgrass,        anything, all that lives,      cut but green    how fresh— breathing still,        sweating a bit,          settling into earth’s disappearing act.    The bees take note and light down.      Somehow, they know         today they are the guests,      blank verse and drone,  salve and song.    We’ve harmed them— yet today    they are flesh,          rosehips, attar,      essence, and we are their children    climbing through…

Seven Summers   That summer someone stole my sister’s horned toad which lived with its eggs in a mayonnaise jar.   That summer a preacher shouted salvation every night for a week from a tent pitched outside a supermarket.   That summer the last case of polio in our neighborhood came to a four year old boy.   That summer a man walked every afternoon in front of the used car lot and held a sign with a giant lemon on it.   That summer I got a ride with Stu Rivers and his pharmacist father to our baseball games in a maroon convertible Riviera.   That summer we put Mercurochrome on our scraped knees and…

My mother’s button box is history in fasteners of every ilk, a rattled mess inside a fruitcake tin, its words long scraped away. Still taped inside its dented lid–the razor blade my mother used to rescue what she could as we outgrew our clothes. She freed white buttons from worn-out shirts, and kept them straight by stringing them like beads on swags of colored thread. Among the many strands of white are two large purple buttons from the overalls she sewed for me by hand when I was four, and tarnished buttons stamped with anchors from my brother’s sailor coat. Here, a scattering of unmatched pearls, sliced from single gloves…