Cutting Down the Last Tree on Easter Island
Man, woman, and infant sit on a cliff with their backs
to stone statues. They pray for good luck
to enter through the wind, to hear

a yes spoken beneath the toromiro tree,
the last one standing since the giant palm
was tricked into falling all over itself.

He tells a story of how birds drop seeds,
and trees push back. The man begins to work.
She fastens the infant to her breast.

Frigates and storm petrels
serve melting sun to melting water.

The infant sucks.
The birds fly away.
Nothing enters through the wind.
The stone statues turn into more than stone.

Horatio at Graveside
It falls to me, the last request of Hamlet,
Not so much lord as friend of my heart
Who was able to plot the way my eye followed a sparrow

Landing upon a tree for a moment’s respite,
While I saw how the wave in him crested
Into the sun’s shimmer on water,

Our minds were of such close hemispheres,
We could spot each other inside the juggle
of life’s changing fortune—

And so he asked me to serve as witness,
To speak of events even as my own bower
Of grief threatened to hurl me beyond hearing,

Knowing there was no way Hamlet could live,
Even as I throw rocks upon his grave,
A bedcover to warm his body,

Which is why I came from such a long way off,
Because I loved him more than any other man
Who stood on this earth and looked at the sun.

I Have My Green Card Now
don't tell me how a people string together thoughts on a beach of content keeps washing up shells and seaweed and dead things they stay for easy pickings in sentence structures the caw caw caw of slang banging into rocks

when I lived in Hungarian my mother tongue more of a step-mother who was married to someone I never knew there were hundreds of words for horses their smell, color, earth at a certain time of day or after a rain I knew where my tongue wrapped around shaped language with loam and light but now I've hit everything the ground running with English how many times in one year malls coupons ATM's express accounts can one person open because I've loaned my soul to the devil and I'm getting no interest

CellPhone Poem 17: Extra Minutes
Business centers confront
each continental shelf,
each wave of water
from my cubicle
to your global positioning device,
a world drawing in upon itself
tighter under pressure
as we turn
into carbon diamonds carbon
diamonds wearing headphones
speaking with instant translators
embedded on the edge of a bluetooth
look Mom no cavities
no more countries
everything a borderland
beneath the freeway
bordering on something else
on something else on something else
where time is a rerun
in a new slot game
and we apple and orange
through the bling bling of it all.

Cannibal Memories
Where will I go to talk to you now that the house has closed and I no longer have the keys or can use the excuse of checking the mail to see if the honeysuckle has started to bloom or if daises are starting to grow after everything front and back yard was leveled?

Where will I go to speak your name now that there’s no place after you died in the front room of the house with glasses of soda, tissues, and a standing orchestra of pill bottles that did not cheer those itinerant trips between your room and the bathroom, your room and the kitchen?

How can I locate you in my cannibal memories and in the things I’ve carried to my next landing: candles, bells, necklaces, a file cabinet, me?

TV Flash Fiction
The size of a 27" television set,
her life was compact, she heard voices

movie stars and their consorts
who stopped for a quick show of teeth

and laughter before taking their places
in the first row of the Grand Ballroom,

where she went remote,
reached for a cigarette, a glass of swollen ice.