Pea Notes

Hey, fancy this: Clyde Barrow had a thing
for sweet peas (creamed) and Buck’s wife
Blanche did shampoos and perms and cuts 
at The Cinderella Beauty Shoppe in Denton. 
In Blanche’s My Life with Bonnie & Clyde, 
written in prison, the juice is in the sides. 

This morning, I saw Upstairs LeeAnn off 
to Germany. (There’s a Downstairs one, too.)
Upstairs LeeAnn, the way she looks (auburn)
and cooks (cakes) and trails a heavenly scent:
Yum. No, scent is too strong. When she’s near, 
you know and feel warm. In Blanche Barrow’s 

autobio, there’s a lot of crooning over husband 
Buck (honestly, gets to be a bit much). But the
editor’s notes (hot chocolate) and flourishes (with
marshmallows) swoon me. End of the day, it’s
the tiny treats I keep. Seeing Loretta Lynn live 

in Honolulu and, back in high school, friend
Mike and I chirping, “I’m raising black-eyed peas 
and blue-eyed babies . . . prayin’ for weather” 
down in the rec room on Rainbow View Drive. 
(Mike’s dead before I catch the sweet irony 

of his growing up on a rainbow.) Mike, 
his parental units, and dog Ginger. Tupperware 
soaking in the sink for hours. Dad working at the P.O., 
packing Mike’s peanut butter and jellies. If bibles 
have a smell, there’s that mixed in as well. 

And somewhere the secret sadnesses 
absorbed in green shag carpet, parents who dote 
on their only child (the idea of him) though 
they never really see him. Whole. 

When Mike’s grown, out of the closet,  
his mom once impulsively asked, 
“Are you ever tempted to cut it right off?” 
(A lot to unpack, huh . . . ) 

After that, he stayed away for a while. 
But all our lives, Mike and me, we’re full 
of guffaws and squelched guffaws 
that happen when you should absolutely NOT
guffaw. Sitting shiva for his partner Paul, to
name one. Good God, the rabbi’s high strung 

“May the Hebrews gather . . .” before heading 
full-tilt nasal into the Kaddish. Horrified, we
bit our cheeks, eyes spilled water, mouths 
contorted with explosive snorts. Oh well, it’s
the flamingoes that open the dance, 

right? Did I mention: Mr. Clyde also liked French 
fries? (peas, no peas—who knows). BTW, Mike 
would love both my LeeAnns. (There’s always 
room for more.) Tonight I munch perfect
strawberries Upstairs gifted me before a white Uber 
whisked her and her three black suitcases away.

Ode to Grief Bacon

Weeks after the pills folded
my grief like an omelet,
I opened a cookbook to taste  

the hollandaise sauce, buttery
and beaming from a spoon
and asked Alexa to turn

the volume up so Sam Cooke
could croon against the cast-irons,
and for the first time

in months, I whisked
three eggs while shuffling
in my socks. I hummed “A Change

Is Gonna Come,” while considering
the elegance of toast,
how the char makes even

the stalest wheat dissolve
on our tongues
in a quick burst of caramel.

Then I opened the package
of thick-cut bacon
as if it were a letter written

in sodium and fatback,
its cursive sizzling in strips
and sopping in grease

that bubbled against my knuckles
which, friends, was a pain
I too toasted into joy—and harried

by heat, I remembered the Germans
have a word for eating
out of despair: kummerspeck,

meaning “grief bacon,” so I sliced
the entire package and watched
the porky sadness shrink

until Sam’s voice grew heavy
with salt, the strips splitting
and spitting and saying only

kummerspeck, kummerspeck,
which is another way
of saying I glided

with a wooden spoon,
dripping yolk across
the canvas of the floor.

Coming Full Circle

Imagine the magic a circle holds, its infinite points—dotted or passing through. Imagine my Tagalog and accent erased, so that I could pass.

I uncovered my mother’s dictionaries in the towel cabinet, her scribbles: proof of definition and memorization. Perfecting English helped her pass.

For the sixth-grade spelling bee, I studied intensely, circling only unfamiliar words, burning them into my brain. My mother, orbiting me. And I passed.

Imagine the power of a trophy or a medal, to a child, the rounded
glory beaming from the walls. My wild and free daughter, wanting to pass.

Is she yours? people say to me. Is that your mom? children ask her, studying her coils and caramel skin. From my womb, you grew. Through my body, you passed.

My anxiety rises like a rocket flare, brief but real, being in a fully
Filipino space. Even in a white space. Oh, but you’ll be fine. You pass.

Pass me courage, make us all balls of limitless love and identity. Here is the open field. Pull back, do a double roulette, and pass.

Have we come full circle? Are we still fishing out words and phrases from the stream, afraid to awake the sleeping eye and ashamed of the past?

There is a description for identity confusion, this lostness: Ang Pilipinong nawawala sa sarili. To not always belong or pass.

---

This poem—a loose ghazal—echoes concepts and Tagalog phrases from Leny Mendoza Strobel’s book Coming Full Circle: The Process of Decolonization Among Post-1965 Filipino Americans (2nd edition). The “sleeping eye” references page 6 where Strobel discusses the Filipino American community’s “identity crisis,” traditional Filipino values versus modern American values,” and the “invisible minority and the sleeping giant.” The loss of language guilt and shame is further contextualized on page 130 (“Why didn’t you maintain the language? Why didn’t you teach me?”).

Faster

What if you were the boy
who gave me his gym shorts all those years ago

that time my best friend wanted to go skinny dipping
with a bunch of strange guys from a band

and i said are you crazy?
and we jumped in the black 

Atlantic fully dressed
and later, watching us drip

head to toe across his (your?) pale 
linoleum, offered to throw

our clothes in the dryer while we listened 
to (his?) your unplugged version of Kryptonite

that still plucks goosebumps when 
it comes up in my running playlist

// what if your grin 
is a secret handshake remembering 

the hungry tone of those
apartment walls & the comforting

smell of the dryer 
underneath the pulse

of the drums // what if 
the cling of my ocean-soaked dress

sometimes 
wakes you up at night— 

what if you grew up, too, with a fist 
full of regrets only answerable

in the next mile, the next doubtful
song you fall in love with?

Another Evening Lowdown

Dangling between
         Mom and Dad,
a ripe fig ready to drop,
         we walked
from ride to ride
         at Clementon Park:

Tea Cups, the Tile-a-whirl—
         roller coaster snaking
toward blue blank space.
         From fear to joy
and back. What else
         to know but this?

Ars Poetica

Black pepper lathered
into brisket, lines like bark—
charred, hickory ripe.

From the Collected Poems of Kermit the Frog

Once there were stars,
strings to dangle them,
an unseen hand disappearing
into the moon’s waxing
ass. It’s all hanged,
you see. My tongue
no longer flicks to the quick
of your hearts. You,
who once flocked weekly
to my swamp, come
no more. I rage
to no one,
not even dear Piggy,
who karate chopped me
so often
with her love.
Oh, these piggy thoughts.
I never laid
my stuffing bare to her. So many
canceled seasons ago,
we lay watching birds
out a window—not
the Sam and Betsy sort,
but ones with
bona fides.
I’m talking plover, cardinal,
and wren—sky-glazed
and singing, but Big Apple
bustle gobbled
them up. I almost
told her I wanted
to spring
into water, plunge to find
bottom, maybe a tadpole
or two. Now this pond resembles
what the mind wants
heaven to be—not a simple
infinity but a closet
that stores all we’ve missed until
it’s needed. Piggy,
wherever you are, does
a hot spotlight still warm
your loneliness? Are you also
haunted by capers lost?  
And have you heard about
poor Nanny, left to a single
paragraph
on the back page of a paper
no one reads anymore? All I can
remember of her now is a song
whispered from a doorway
just before I sink
into dreams.

To be a man

don’t sob at the sight of your grandfather’s ashes stored in a mausoleum for war veterans and husks of grandfathers that once loved but have since formed their hands into oysters. He powdered the pearls. South of the Greyhound station, you once ate biscuits, drank orange juice against the violet dayglow of the morning. You try

to recall what stories he said back then, but no amount of trying unbuilds the mausoleum that houses how you see him now—ashes long since cooled, knuckles long since calloused. Look at the oranging picture they set beside his wrinkled lilies, the one where he held the husks of three doves lined in a row, bellies slipping out of slits. In the South, a man is nothing more than the pain he could inflict. You can form

anything into a marriage of shame and silence. Pick a wife with a curved form and lips of sweet meringue, whose dreams are just as soft and shallow. If you try to leave your birthright, remember your stepfather whose crew in southern Vietnam traded Polaroids of heads and ragged entrails as currency—ashy cheeks, eyes somehow always looking up. They were just carrion, husks. Look at your stepfather now—a man who holds more pride in Agent Orange

than in birthing two daughters—and how he once spat clustered bombs of orange napalm on weeping village wives. He goes to sleep so easy, like forming a fist. You must be like him, like your grandfather, like the carob husks of Morocco whose purpose is to wrinkle and burn and become powder. Try once more to leave your birthright, to never become deciduous. Even the ash that holds the Nine Worlds in its womb, even the palo verde of Southern

California that dances like fireworks or arteries, even you, one day, south of heaven, will become a mausoleum. Think of your mother, her orange blossom tea and her lacy summer dresses and how she made the world her ash—tray after her lips deflated and her skin leathered and she couldn’t terraform her womb to support two daughters. Your stepfather did his best. He tried to be good. You must empathize since you too feel that gravity (the need to husk

something from its shell, like the wives and daughters who strip husks of rice with warm hands and leathered feet, who live in huts in southern Bangladesh with hopes of never seeing a single plane in the sky). Try to remember how easy it can be to leave, to smoke a carton of orange Pall Malls in a rusting cerulean pickup like your birth father did, forming fingers into snakes or oysters or carob pods still hooked to the tree. You can ash

that cigarette anytime. Try as you might to escape your birthright, husks of doves and daughters are expected so that your own ashes can rest, south of heaven, where oranges will blossom, where a mausoleum will form.

Ghazal for the Cast Iron

Because I haven’t taken the bristle pad’s sudsy scraping grace
to scour this pan as I do all others, erasing the grease

of bacon and garlic, because in coarse salt and shortening
and three wadded up paper towels I trust, I grace

this pan with butter, the slick black metal muting
turmeric’s threadbare screams. So little of what we make we grace

with time’s peppered gristle. Even rot’s scrubbed clean by rain and soil.
But this held my grandmother’s hashbrown casserole, saving grace

of red potatoes. This my grandfather’s good eye, goose-white
and gleaming as he sizzled the hams of West Virginia, graced

his knotted stomach with the dinner he’d scarf beneath
the nightshift’s ochre light, a piece of himself saying grace

with each raised fork. When my mother died on a street smooth
as a skillet, my father cooked himself through grief. Tonight, no grace

of rain on bloody asphalt, but short rib seared until meat falls
from bone, the once-translucent onion darkening in a wine-swilled grace,

and I hold this grease-hiss of family with a singed oven mitt,
oil bursts saying: Josh, even from burning comes a little grace.

The Fish

At first,

the bags of water
walked:

through red deserts,
through green forests,
through gray cities.

And then,

the bags of water
talked:

about race,
about gender,
about equity.

And then,

the bags of water
balked:

over history,
over liberty,
over private property.

And then,

the bags of water
stalked:

demanding homogeneity,
demanding retribution,
demanding silence.

And then, 

the bags
of water became unstopped:

drowning libraries,
drowning classrooms,
drowning cattle, chickens, and pigs.

And when
the bags of water
were empty,

they danced in a circle,
and prayed for a river.

The dark sky answered
and afterwards,
it just

rained
and reined
and reigned:

soaking our yards,
soaking our bread,
soaking our shirts,
soaking our shoes,
soaking our soil,

until all that was left were the fish.

Self Portrait as a Blushing Petal, Nestled into the Melt

I felt the seams of sky loosen and balloon over us the day I pedaled to your house, / my white skirt billowing behind me. Before, the ache did not disturb. Before, I clung to my / wake, vermilion and veined. I don’t know why the sun raked at my back, intensely begged me / to make my way to you. Does a crocus question / its readiness to bloom? Del Playa stretched open—this is where we kissed, the saltiness sealing familiarity on our lips. How many blackflies / have swarmed us since the night, digging us a ditch, / picking up next fight? Rousing our panic / like scattering field mice? But we floated / above this traffic, our bodies satin / in suspension, the tendrils / of our fingers irreversibly / and invisibly tangled, / and I can’t / and won’t / explain / this enigma, / a sweet fragrance / of red hibiscus / glazing over us / This stem, aerial, and erect. / These stipules, present, and free. / Our fusion protects a younger leaf— / look how she collects the dew, drinks in light / every time laughter shakes our joints. She may never know / how we suffered and recovered from two hard frosts. The blight crystallized, / thought never hardening us. I prefer this side of the story, how we came out warm. / and a bit weathered on the other end. I want to cup the syrupy smell in my hands again.

for her, an offering / of what love can cocoon. / Maybe now it’s plumeria / perfuming this place, / interlaced with the urge to love you / harder, love you even when / the biggest freeze of all towers over us, / livid and lethal. And yet-this stem, deep-rooted. / This blushing petal, nestled into the melt- / shivering in the delicate spring wind. / when you cradle me, heat flares. / When the stars spin / in wild directions, / you say, Burn, burn, / and explode into everything / you touch.

Sanctuary

Not enough of us in that neighborhood

to make teams, but we had two patches

of woods straddling the road that led

maybe a quarter-mile from our corner

to the drive-in. Only a few acres, but enough

for a world of exploration. Unlike our own neat

yards, with careful trees and well-tended

aromatic roses. No one tended the woods.

If my father wanted firewood,

I could lead him to the windfalls.

Otherwise, none of the adults ventured

into our woods. Mostly the place was abandoned

except for me and maybe another kid,

never more than three of us,

poking around in the familiar wild.

The boggy smells, some fallen trees, wild blackberry canes,

and the remains of old kid-projects that might have been

meant as forts, or clubhouses, but forgotten

by some earlier generation of explorers, or by us.

Cars whizzing by on the raised highway, on the edge

of what we could choose not to hear.

Now the road passes a sports complex

on the way to extended parking for the shopping mall.

Our woods have vanished, from the Parkway

to where the drive-in was, familiar to

memory and imagination,

respite from the neat imagined lives

of our parents.

First published in Peacock Review.

Song for Cassiopea

for Kaden, marine biologist

---

As a child, you were nothing but stalk—

polyp form emerging, latching

onto nearby structures, your body

neither male nor female, still

you create your clones, proliferate

in mangrove swamps—

too warm for many, too polluted—

you are easy in that way.

Leaving polyp form, you are medusa,

telltale bell and arms but no platonic ideal, 

moons backlit in aquaria.

Among your jelly peers,

you seem confused, pulsating 

upside down, elaborate tendril arms

forever seeking.

Swimmers who know are not afraid.

Your sting is mild—not like the man o’ war,

but you hold a secret. Under stress,

you will release your stinging cells, tiny bombs

awaiting prey, distant from your rococo arms 

pretending to be coral.

My child, future scientist, picked you of all creatures

to examine. After navigating stinging waters of school, 

carrying a body mischosen by fate. Unloveable jellies—

bane of bathers, enemy of engineers, useless 

nuisance, beauty of the deep.

Now, this child, transitioned,

buries himself in science, studies

how you protect yourself,

disappearing so easily—

thinner than a contact lens.

I see you stretching back into Cambrian fossils,

doing the hard work of evolution, organizing cells 

into your chosen bodies, accomplishing 

miraculous survival.

Of the Macho

Mi hermano says he can’t change flat tires on his bicycle

anymore. His wrists too weak, can’t leverage the tire’s bead over

the rim. In high school he was the State all-around gymnastics

champion. His body flying over bars and mats.

A no ignition Johnny Blaze.

Now he places a white plastic lawn chair

in his shower. Safer, if you sit.

One summer afternoon when we were unchecked

college students, our lifeguard friend unlocked

the diving bay at the local public pool for

our romanticized athletic desires.

We bounced on the high dive, happy after some beers,

sending each other into the atmosphere.

Admiring our splashes

that exploded over the wall. Our friend

shaking her head,

our horsing around a real danger,

she claimed. And maybe,

because we both wanted to kiss her, we dared

each other in a contest of the macho. Who could

leap off the high dive board and come

closest the pool’s edge on the opposite side.

The entire pool in the shade of the early evening now, and

he launched first. His entire body embracing

the wilderness moment. A leap of redemption,

of joy, of middle-class boredom,

because they never let you howl. He landed like a perfect

arrow, un clavo, en punto, feet first, a daring splash two feet

from the edge. I swam over to him, and told him he was

crazy. He was the winner. No question, no contest.

I climbed out and watched him

glide through the water to the other wall.

He pulled his body out of the pool, the water

released him to the air. A wind of calm rushing over

the surface. The water returning to glass.

First published in Gigantic Sequins, June 2020.

Itemized Checks

There’s a coyote’s skull at Hurricane Creek / there’s a new table in your section / your life, sectioned / an hour of each day in each canine eyeball / a new set of fangs / sun-bleached / the customers / sun-bleached / coyote could run but eight hundred miles / four highways / alley smoke break / cool-running river for paws to dip / don’t stop a ruptured lung / internal wounds / essential / contained / your stress / contained / paws hit stone & entrees hit table / & you’re still moving / & you haven’t hiked in months / & breath still comes / shallowing / tumbling / a fall forward / gravity’s grace / you wonder, what kills a coyote? / you wonder, will you always be only passing through? / there’s a high turnover at this restaurant / there’s a copperhead in the water / biding time / binding time to the instant of / strike / sink / release / breathe in / release / if you call out, will they fire you? / if you die somewhere, is it finally Home?

decant desperation

there are no words for
a mother in mourning
her cries are
swans’ calls
seeking swift shelter
no bonfire can warm her
she floats,
aimlessly
as wayward winds transpire
to annex all that is stainless,
and wide-eyed
and safe
we sully each strand of sureness
delegating those who wish
to wield walls
of lax laws
as paragons of purview
whilst those who hold tender
the prospects of purpose
the benign benefactors
vying for vicious venom
of the ravenous rabble
are swayed into
submission
as if one could
defeat despair
why must we wield wounds
as weapons?

The Boys of Kenneth Street

We played mumbletypeg with jackknives.
We stole Playboys from the first 7/11.
We played corkball and kickball
and football in the street. Cars
interrupting a game were given a
raspberry. We weren’t really hoodlums—
we were too timorous—but we liked
the new rock music and, given the chance,
we snarled like Mick Jagger. Kenneth
Street was base and our peregrinations
took us to the drugstore or the woods.
We strutted and talked about girls as if
we knew the secret thing. Our world
spun only one way. The 60s passed and
we moved around more. The connection
remained. I still count on these boys,
who taught me nascent masculinity,
and what the world was like beyond our
neighborhood. Those times we ran
together, so long ago now, took place in
an America that is gone. Gone too
our innocence. And the need, which burned in
us like holy fire, to be more than what we were.

EXCEPT YOU

What gets archived
a song in November
a psalm in the fields
chants around a fire?

Wearing their good shoes
huddled up the earth is heated
and scraped off the next morning.

Nobody will remember
except you
who swept the floor
and kept love.

shyness can stop you

this little silver instamatic camera shoots panoramas.
fits in your pocket, if there's no chewing gum or keys in there. it’s no
picturesque paul simon kodachrome.
more like a drugstore analog fix, but in-disposable.
she's reliable—she's well-traveled—she's seen the empire state, all
over the east coast.
she's had redondo to san pedro in her sights, too.
no, she's not fancy, she doesn't have flash, yet she lets me see the
world through 5 x 6 matte, avec sloppy borders.
she's visited thousands of unique daffodil faces.
some in-focus, others blurry, caught in a distorted blizzard dream.

one face i wish she got a better look at:
a nameless piano player near the sunnyside playground. he was
magnificent: his own skyscraper, his own ocean: an eighth wonder.
no frills, no tourist traps, pure & free.
a spotlight shone on him and him only, casting every pair of
untrained eyes and ears into blackness.
i hoped for some discreet profile of his sweaty, barechested,
maestro frame, jerry lee lewis-ing, leon russell-ing his way into my
celluloid memories.
so humble yet so good—fingers and sensibility unencumbered. i wanted to
go up and ask him if he could be my sierra nevada, if he could be my
superstar.
instead, i took a hazy, distant snapclick from the steadfast
streetcorner.

shy, introverted, bashful cole just didn't have it in him.
though, i know she did.
there was a sentry blocking those palace gates.
a detached receiver in that telephone booth.
then: the most intimate question.
now: my devastation, my missed shot.
he might’ve even been flattered, chuffed, pleased at the proposition.
instant regret filled my fluttering, i didn’t catch the 10:05 bus,
conflicted, crushed, anxious thundercloud torso, now squeezed tight in the
station between my toes and my socks.
a falling, stillborn feeling.
a stomach dropping out of its highwire act.
above all, the real misfortune was felt by my pintsized photographe. her blank,
idle 35mm film only gets old, languishes, and expires.

Unarbitrary Definition for The New Concise Modern Dictionary of Synchromysticism

because · /bɪˈkɒz/ · conjunction. 1. Because the limited, dual nature of the human mind necessitates the illusion of cause and effect. 2. Because all things connected must be understood conjoined, conjoined and ever changing. 3. Because the wings of butterflies cause hurricanes. 4. Because A must equal B, & B must equal C; A must also equal C; so you were wrong, Siddhartha: to eliminate desire is to eliminate all life. 5. Because I need you like the island needs the ocean, deluded in the isolated joys of boundary. 6. Because Time is Space & Space is Time, and both constructions of the bodies (see also: celestial, solar, heavenly, physical, and divine). 7. Because we conceive of Incarnations, conceived in concepts from the moment of conception. 8. Because we ask the question, “Why?” 9. Because the Postmodern has fallen upon us; and the Continental Philosophers all were French; and the French have always had it written in their language: the answer to pourquoi? is just pourquoi. 10. Because we always need a reason. 11. Because explanations make us feel profound. 12. Because I held you, I will someday lose you. 13. Because we love, we all will suffer. 14. Because we all do suffer, we must love.