Explore Poems: Youth

I remember that jasmine bush. 

But I’d forgotten the yellow couch.

I can’t bear our small faces in the…

Pretend you are a potato
& hide in a sack
peek at the earth through a hole
while they are carrying you
from the garden to the cellar...

of time, of course, sliced inwardly;
no matter how brief the moment,
halve it again, and the endlessness…

i

Вдавати що ти картопля
ховатися в мішок
дивитися на світ крізь дірочку
доки тебе несуть із город…

Boys will be boys, the saying goes,
even if that boy will one day
age into Messiah. One would
never guess…

We were wild children / we moved through space / like blades
We were tame children / we fell to sleep…

At the playground, my mother hid from me, I couldn’t find her, and I called her name a thousand times…

Back when my hair barely covered my forehead
I was picking flowers in front of the gate.
You rode over…

The dentist is now the same
age as me, which is troubling,
mostly because of what I
have and have not done…

For the sake of argument, let’s say
the day my father outlawed all contact
between backhand and face, …

You’re fifteen and nowhere in a town on the edge of pitiful lands stripped of fruit. The burger van’…

Stiletto melon collies, a tinsel mystic streaks our homeplace.

Lantern flies triple from the sleeping…

they announce us      Valentina Covarrubias montada en Viento
my girl does not cower           does not wave or smile…

I love cherries.
The fruit, juice, jam,
blossoms, prints on a summer
dress, in a black forest cake…

The first gun we knew came in a toolbox for the apocalypse: hammer, barrel, crushed can, pack of Newports…

v.
Isn’t it dangerous to be a woman? Surrounded by men, questions
about risk-taking, parenting (I’m childless…

Gazing at the sky, all cloud-strewn
A child wonders, Where’s my moon?

Child cries a river like a monsoon…

After the storm, Zach and the girls sprawled on the dock,
legs disappeared in the lake. They were arguing…

and yes it does beg
the question why
a nine-year-old needs
two twenty-dollar bills still
sticky and …

Long, empty roads stretching as long as the gas tank is willing—
Sixty-seven dollars left from last …