Prepare the fatted calf. Again.

I have been the prodigal daughter
exactly twenty-five times,
once a year since my belly
expelled stolen merlot.

Bring me the echo
I lost in grade school,

sixth, I think,

when my mother cut my hair
from waist to chin.
I want those cast strands
to knit into a book
I can read at midnight
when I fear I won't return.

I have been the prodigal daughter
exactly twenty-five times,
including two stints in choir

now that's cheap rehab

where I sung alto
to chipped cement saints,
let the communion wafers
cleave to my palate
like chunky peanut butter.

Give me my voice,
the timbre I dropped
in a box canyon
layered with insult,
a sandstone parfait.

I have been the prodigal daughter
exactly twenty-five times,
like the twenty-five pounds
I gained between the deaths of my parents.

I offer God a pound today
a pound a week,
flesh to swap for forgiveness.

Cienfuegos Capture

White stone against black. Click. Mortimer laughed. A ceiling fan some hundred vomit painted rooms away wobbled, told me I made the wrong fucking move. Again. Again.

"Bonita Seymour, we may have the same last syllable, but you can't fucking play Go."

My name's not Seymour.

I didn't say it. Didn't think it. What's the fucking point? His eyes made the next move, sparse eyebrow dipping into blue pupil, blue stone, blue, hard, hard, hard ice hard, until it turned black stone, click against white. The table shivered, but I didn't know if it was the heat, my fractal focus, the fucking mushroom the guard handed me. Xylaria hypoxylon. You can't fool a fucking biologist. The table shivered.

Fuck. Good move.

"Kosumi. I answer the keima with kosumi."

All my life's a fucking proverb. A fucking proverb. What the hell did I do to land in this fucking mosquito trap?

White turned black turned white turned black. Then white. Black. White. The stones slid like fingertip UFOs over a faded, scratched cornfield, a stepped crop circle of archaic strategy. Japanese war strategy. Why the fuck am I casting Asian game pieces on this fucking banana skin table instead of collecting new specimens in Caye Coco? Why the fuck am I in this sweltering hell hole, playing for life, for my escape, for a haunted cigar, for my children, my dear children. Two years since I saw them, Juanes and Pepita. Do they remember they have a mother?

I lost count.

I lost appetite. Sweat memorized my back, my forehead.

I lost memory, too, of the white hashed trees my mother called populus tremula that stood sentry to my childhood home. White bark trees. White stones. The game continued. Click. White stone against black.

"So. You wanna break for tamale? Black beans?"

Don't patronize me.

I willed it, didn't say it, didn't say My Name is Belamor. Belamor. I have long hair and soft breasts like your mother. I have no need for tamale. I didn't say it.

White against black. I collected the stones, his stones, replaced them with mine in ancient rhythm. Groovy. Fucking groovy, fucking groove, groove pitted deep with the dried skin of pig, the fried skin of pig, chicharrones, I will replace all your stones with mine, with mine. I will replace them.

The table shivered. I remembered the mushrooms. The xylaria hypoxylon, the xylaria hypoxylon, the campanulatus, the cubensis, the black, the white, the mushrooms that mirrored my hell here on game board. Fuck. Why did I take them?

White against black. Click. He moved black, black, black, stole my white, my stones, my children, my tamale. Black.

The table shivered.

I have a poem in the new issue of Ocho

You can get more information about Ocho #2 here.

The Hat

The afternoon of my mother's wake I bought a Stetson at a pawn shop. It hung next to a stringless guitar. It hung, covered in the invisible dust of money hungry pain. It hung on a tarnished brass hook. I paid five dollars to a man with an orange-striped shirt. I don't remember his face.

I placed the hat on the passenger seat of my car. A Stetson. Black. The oiled pitch of movie malevolence. The hat wore a woven leather band decorated with an engraved silver charm. Two sizes larger than my head. Grade thirty X, the Rolls Royce of fox fur sculpture.

Hey you, I said to the hat. My mom died.

The hat made sympathetic noises. The hat expressed displeasure at the change of schedule.

After the funeral I placed the hat on my bed's extra pillow, the space I saved for a lover. The hat took root. I felt it push tendrils through the green satin, through duck down, through layers of coiled springs and metal frame. I felt it push into the oak floorboards, into the crawl space, into the ground rich with uranium and feldspar. I fueled the germination with my fingers. I traced the spiral galaxy etched into silver. I brushed the hat with care, sprayed it with rain repellent. I loved the hat, loved the way it smelled like roadtrip ozone.

I told the hat stories at night, stories about my day, about my children. I told the hat it was much more than a five dollar whim. Sometimes the hat listened. Sometimes it didn't. The hat's roots pulled memory from the underworld, a place not-yet-separated from its prior owner. The hat kept one upturned side-brim touching my sheets, but the other side sunk into the pillowcase.

My wrists weren't strong enough to pull the hat from the bed. One day I went in search of a shovel to transplant it to a more suitable environment, but I got sidetracked by my father/kids/dog/work.

We're dying, they said. Leave that damn hat alone and attend to us.

I did. The hat understood. The hat was not happy. I asked the hat for help but it sat still. I asked the hat to rub my back, to cook me dinner, to tell me funny jokes. The hat would not budge.

After a while I slept with my back to the hat. I wore old sweats to bed instead of frilly lingerie. I wanted the hat to notice that I was lonely. The hat did not. It remembered the pawn shop. It remembered its old life. It remembered the five dollars. It pointed a brim finger at me. It told me I made the roots stronger.

I grabbed a shotgun and shot in the air above the hat.

Get out of my bed you mean old lazy crummy hat! I yelled. I didn't mean it. I wanted the hat to protest. The hat fell to the floor. It sat there for two days.

I packed the hat in a box yesterday. I wrapped it in plastic. I stuck stamps on the side of the box. I stuffed an old beadspread in the hole left by the roots. I slept alone.

Changeling

In the midst of my terror,
in the midst of my storm
that lasts a full cycle of rotation,

in the midst of the swelling of waters,
something presses on the side of my earth,
presses past an invisible barrier.

A force like a firm hand,
like a the blink of my eye,
like a lit July sparkler.

I can't see or hear this force
beyond the barrier, can only taste
the repercussions of its actions.

I listen to the urges
growing within my body,
build primitive shelter.

I ride out my storm
in a dinghy that by science
should collapse under the pressure.

But the force holds me steady,
and I float,
focused and unafraid.

The supersaturation tried
to kill me,
I who am part earth, part song.

But something soterial,
something concerned with my salvation
won't let it succeed.

Invisible

Designing magnets might sound complicated,
but it’s a simple art.
First you collect the experimental specifications.
Scientists want their magnetic fields
to act certain ways.

Sometimes they need a steep field profile,
one that hits ions with brute Gaussian force.

Sometimes they need something more subtle,
a gentle rise of magnetic power
that coaxes particles in desired directions.

You start by estimating
what your magnet might look like,
taking into consideration
the specifications desired
and your past experience
with similar specifications.
Specifications are the shit.

You feed the parameters of your design
into a computer program
that calculates a field map,
and out spits a topographical chart
showing the magnetic field
at any point near your magnet.

You make adjustments and do it again,
and again,
and again,
finally reaching something
that approximates the desired outcome,
but never quite matches it.

Escarpment

Telescope lens
focuses on wicker chair
dead center dead
in water field.

I stand wide aperture
eye on eyepiece,
hands dial clarity,
ass bends twine.

Ankle, shin,
patella skim algae,
sink hole echo,
quicksand covers neck.

I twist rusted controls,
watch bottom lip fall.
My hair cracks surface,
negative garden.

Sedona

A blue-haired grandmother
at the chamber of commerce
gave us a photocopied map of Sedona
with the famous vortex sites
marked with a black triangle.

"These are the energy centers.
If you hike through them
you can feel the nature spirits
move through your body.
Some people hear voices.
Some people see mysterious things."

She droned like a wound up recording
on a slow tape recorder,
every word ran into the next,
and she didn't flinch
when he asked her a pointed question.

"These aren't real, right?
It's just a tourist trap joke.
Do you believe these vortex sites exist?"

He rolled his eyes and handed me the map.
The sweat from his hands smudged the ink
so that the mystery places looked blurry,
tired even,
and the clerk readied another map
for the next person in line.

"Sir, I am only reporting
what visitors to Sedona
have experienced for many years.
We don't guarantee a vortex experience."

We left the town
and drove to the site
I chose from the map,
a place called Boynton Canyon.
We hiked up a rocky hill,
all red rock and green bits of sage,
the path littered with a hundred
handmade towers of three stones each.

Power cairns,
I heard them called in the town,
you reach to the earth
and find three smooth stones,
build a tower with intention
and prayer for goodness and peace,
leave it in your desert wake.

I stopped to make a tower
while he pressed forward.
I said a prayer for the planet,
for my lover,
for the love between us,
but the wind blew cold and loud,
seemed to take my words
in the wrong direction,
a vortex of sadness.

This is my life, I thought.
I build a tower;
think of how to bless it,
but the wind takes it away.

My Tablature

A and B and key of C,
never harsh minor keys
or the adventures
of a new alphabet.

A scrawny brown
circle of dog
with nose tucked
into tail begs
at my feet.
Ribs show through
sparse fur;
part of one
ear is missing.

He wears no collar.

I wear no might.

I wrap pieces
of Mom's death
in hope chest scented tissue,
try to floss stray bits
from my molars,

but my loss is a hitchhiker,
a girl of eighteen
with a bulging pregnant belly.

We ride in silence.

She holds her hair
in her right hand,
rested against growing baby,
long and straight and black and oily.

I am forfeit

I am a sagging couch
in a cracked panel room,
a metal elbow rack
slung with chipped plates.

I am rum yellow moths
under medicine light,
an echo spider pattern
across your cheeks.

I am slick ordinary,
a plastic Virgin Mary,
a dim mixing bowl
heaped with salted greens.

I am twisted gray braids
hiding calico wrinkles,
or one upturned sole
made of tire-blown rubber.

I am no bird I know,
a child Popeye arm,
perched behind your neck
on dwindling frizzy knots.