Release Party
You'd already left for Spanish immersion class,
I had my own baptism to take care of,
so I showered, but wanted

to lie on a bed of frozen raspberries,
each a clit pressed against my back.
Let's say I was motivated.

I walked outside the condo
with a bucket to go picking
when I heard the new neighbor say,

"You've got alot of duende
being out at night,"
and it wasn't even night,

tech vendors were on the march,
schools were wide open
everyone was driving carefully,

but from a car radio came a remix
of the Kurds and Rockefellers
pounding harder at every corner,

when a voice announced,
"Get the defibrillator." And I did.
And it was a good thing, too,

it brought me back
to my galvinized bucket,
filled with longing.

Movie Review of X-Men: The Last Stand
A friend and I had tired of viewing Netflix DVDs on our 13-inch monitors and thought that over the Memorial Day Weekend, we'd treat ourselves to a visit to the big screen. The next question was what to see on the big screen. Oddly, it turned out that we were individuals who shunned fads. Both of us had neglected to read the Da Vinci Code and I myself had to admit to only knowing what "Sex in the City" was all about until several years after its debut on HBO when I was able to rent all the DVDs from Netflix and watch the smashing conclusion with Mikhail Baryshnikov, which is to say that we didn't want to see the Da Vinci Code.

I, instead, suggested that we see the third X-Men movie, having read positive reviews with intimations of a drug that had been found to cure the mutants of their weirdness. It offered the possibility of an intelligent movie that was fun at the same time: moral choices with character development and lots of computer animation.

I was game and so was my buddy. So despite the fact that I had confused the movie times with another theater, we found ourselves in front of the big screen, having missed all but one of the noisy trailers and quickly sitting down for a recap of the last two X-Men movies as Professor Xavier (Patrick Stewart) and Magneto (Ian McKellen) recruit young mutants from the sofa of their parents' living rooms. (This might be, I thought, a science fiction version of Harry Potter.)

Quick Disclosure: I am unfamiliar with the two other X-Men movies preceding this one, and score low on series trivia tests.

The movie was overall entertaining. Storm (Halle Berry) knows how to roll her eyes into her head until the pupils disappear better than anyone I know, if you go in for that sort of thing. Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) is hunky enough, but didn't have the real pathos of Lon Chaney's Wolf Man. (Is it wrong to ask for depth?) Mostly, as the movie ensued, I bemoaned all the lost opportunities to grapple with some tantilizing issues. For instance:

Why does Magneto flash his concentration camp tattooed numbers on his arm when some young mutant upstart insists on seeing his mark? (Forgive me if this is explained in previous episodes.) What I really want to know is how his experience has turned him into a sort of warped genius, in some ways not unlike parents who survived the Holocaust not ever discussing the pain of that experience with their offspring, but succeed in fucking them up nevertheless.

Why is the choice to take the drug and lose mutant individuality not a bigger moral question?

Only Rogue (Anna Paquin) grapples with the issue, if only for a few moments of screen time. Her special powers don't allow for physical contact with other human beings and she wants to get close, really close to the Iceman (Shawn Ashmore). But what about other more philosophical issues that could've been explored? Sure, a few of the characters proclaim, "There's nothing wrong with us," and in the end, regular hum-drum humanity gets to co-exist with the mutant population who now have a representative in the White House in the character of Hank "Beast" McCoy.

But what about examining parallels with the thousands of people in the United States who rely on mood-enhancing drugs to control their neurosis, which is not a judgment call, only a question. At what point does the quality of our lives become so terrible that we surrender ourselves to the cure or to the pill, or to an operation? The choice for HIV and AIDS patients is surely about life or death. But what about cases that are more subtle? What if someone doesn't want to be chosen by their special gift and grows tired of its demands?

Then I was confused by the internal "them" and "us" scenario -- the older more schooled X-Men who've benefitted by Professor Xavier's tutoring on how to use their gifts (don't let the power control you, something many of us learn in driving school), versus the younger tattooed and pierced hordes who team up with Magneto to kidnap and kill a bald boy who's hidden in a drug company's corporate headquarters on Alcatraz Island. His DNA is the source of this miracle drug.

As a group, Magneto's crew are a lot less sophisticated then Xavier's, who've had the benefits of a sort of ivy league education in the mansion. So what kind of comment is this upon public education as school becomes increasingly focused on passing tests and less upon critical thinking? Is our educational system producing unruly children who consider violence a viable solution?

A few other questions: Does it really take blowing up and moving the Golden Gate Bridge to Alcatraz to accomodate one of the punky mutants, the Juggernaut (Vinnie Jones), who's never learned how to swim? You'd think that an intelligent older guy like Magneto could come up with a more energy-saving solution.

Then what about the human population at large? How do they feel about the mutants merging back undetected into their ranks? Neighborhood populations always seem to be uneasy when child predators are paroled back into their communities.

And what about the nature of life once a grand mutant like Magneto, now stung with the drug's needle, is condemned to sit at a park bench, trying to stir the pieces of a chess board with his outstretched finger? How does it feel to be ordinary and to sit around remembering your old glory days?

I applauded for a moment where there's a scene with Patrick Stewart on the mansion's lawn, discussing the nature of violence. But it comes and goes too quickly.

I know. I'm too serious, and the film is based on a comic book. However, why not think graphic novel? I bemoan lost opportunities to explore provocative questions that the script raises. I refuse the notion that a sci-fi thriller can't do that. (What about 2001: A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick?)

Maybe I'm one of those mutants who expects more.

Houdini's Cousin in the Storage Unit
She was moving from a 10 by 15 into a 5 by 9, downsizing whatever she'd packed into plastic boxes with seals that popped when I lifted them like they were filled with effervescent secrets, household remains, until she'd decided to make the pile smaller so she gave stuff away -- not the piano, it was her husband's, he played -- to people who kept driving up in cars until the pile was small enough to move to the second floor where we stacked her stuff, me and PeeWee who had a stroke six months before and Freddy who bought PeeWee $15.00 worth of gas that morning so he could get there. She said how I was a magician for getting her shit into one space, and I said that's why alot of people called me Houdini and I wondered how he did those tricks, and she said she knew. Really, I said. Really, she said, because she was Houdini's cousin her father use to tell her it was all muscle control, he'd expand his chest when they chained him up, and after they dropped him into the river, he'd let out his breath and escape from the slack.

String Theory
A woman walks down a path in early spring,
a firetrail that runs along a creek,
bloated with the excess of winter.

But today golden poppies are arched to the sun,
as the woman spots a brown snake, new in length,
stretched across the road, its tongue

begging for hand-outs from every rustle.
She bends down to see the solicitor.
But seeing happens so quickly,

even if with her own two eyes,
as dragonflies piggyback around her,
she touches the string of snake with an outstretched finger.

Her act is an instinctual thing,
while observing is an acquired art.
Never mind. She's in the thick of it now,

follows the snake through water, to the other side
of the water's bank, until she turns into snake,
and twining around him, even his cold blood feels warm.

Un Dia Sin Imigrantes
It happened in Spanish.
My father stood behind a kid wearing a T-shirt
printed with "Hecho in Mexico," and waved to me
from across the street pointing to a digital
camera like he knew how to use one.

I haven't seen him in years.
He didn't drive either, said he didn't have time
to learn, worked six days a week supporting three girls.
My mother was the one who drove.

She was there also, her arm chain-linked through his
like in the olden days when they were still alive,
watching from the stand as everyone marched up 14th Avenue--
grandparents, uncles, Moms, Dads,
kids stuffed inside strollers and backpacks.

They waved harder now,
began to chant "Si Se Puede" in a broken language,
and the sound of their letters
stamped through the air.

Lost and Found Department
It's like I mean
I just didn't know

You know everyone tells you
you don't know
you don't know
you don't know
And the thing is you don't know
so you don't even know that you don't know
you know what I mean?

It's like-

I don't know.

University Art Museum Berkeley
I enter the bathroom stall
of the museum

leave the door open
paint a Jackson Pollack

drip color everywhere
a work of art

in white porcelain
until gold flecks splinter sky

the energy of one man
bursting into dendrites

no one sees me pee
and I am a forest

Dressed as a Wedding Guest
Riding on a bus, dressed in a black suit
with the dust of his travels
making a path across his buttoned jacket,
hair neatly trimmed into a gable
that points to a nose
that speaks nothing to his mouth,
but then,
a nose is for smelling danger.

The wedding guest feels
for a loose cord braided
beneath his jacket,
a loose cord that leads back
to where he came from,
a loose cord that is simple,
unlike his life that has no words,
so he waits

to deliver his gift
to the assembled party
riding with him on the bus,
heads pressed to glass,
when the man who is dressed
as a wedding guest,
pulls the cord,
and marries them all to the same thing.

The Collapse
so buried inside sadness
dig to remove rubble
see who walks out

daffodils say
hide in the pampas grass
with the sparrows.

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.

Contrary to Common Belief
Good guys don't always wear white
sometimes they shine leopard green
orange red even yellow

if you want to know a man
watch the way sinewy night
curves next to his sorry spine

why a man fights to wear black
along a taut stretch of hide
how he enters your brown eyes.

CellPhone Poem 16: More Breaking Up
burned sage smudge sticks in the house
drank vodka & pomegranate juice
spliced my heart saw it beating
there was no getting past you
this number will always have static

CellPhone Poem 15: Waiting for the Call
I'm waiting to get the call in the fumes of the Caldicott Tunnel
or along the MacArthur Maze where I'm queued up to pay the bridge toll,
in traffic listening to the radio CD player boom box in the car next to me,
cellphone ringing waiting for speakers to announce the doctor's diagnosis
if I need surgery got the job when I'll be moving need to pick her up
and what the hell I'm supposed to do now I have nothing
to remind me should've saved your messages
water under the bridge going over in a bucket
everything freezes until coffee spills. My head is hot.

Today I'm sitting in the back of the 72R bus
with a woman talking to her mother,
I know because she keeps saying, "Mom, I love you, Mom.
You have to believe in God and ask for help."
The good daughter of San Pablo with blonde highlights
gets off where I do, but jumps on another bus
spreading her message. The cellphone in my purse is ringing.
My mother died years ago.

The News
it always takes longer than I want for anything to happen in direct proportion to the depth of my longing, which is not to suggest that if I stop insisting the world cough up what it owes me right now, it will happen; au contraire, the forces of watchfulness will be on to my game and make me wait, teach the lesson of submission to the one thing I care about, and just when I think I’ve finally got whatever it is I’ve been looking for, it turns into a squall of hummingbirds, disappears down the red throat of morning.

Braking News
while big cranes slip beneath the Bay Bridge, we two play hooky, out-of-practice after I don’t know how long of hurling Homeric epithets at each other, my green-eyed Econoline van, wearing sweats and peeling down quickly to basic moves that holler back to an earlier time when you weren’t taking pills to keep your heart going, and when I had a full set of lungs; I pedal with my tongue, you inside my mouth; we speed down the hill, brake for hesitation, come crashing into each other. On one side of the bed as you stretch out, I think you must be a cold black star, collapse, and leave me alone.

Bad News
and for years, I sat around believing you’d take action, that everything was going to change, but the exercise machine remained a clothes hanger, the goggles never made it to the pool, and I never made it to your bed, only the breathing machine that slept with you regulating each sigh while you waited for the father you never knew to come home.

Good News
there are always drugs: Lanoxin, Lasix, Carvedilol, Tolinase; your every day over-the-counter Tylenol Extra-Strength, Tylenol Migraine, Tylenol for Right Brain, Aspirin to take every day for the rest of your life, codeine, morphine if you're on a medical plan or have a good dentist, in-your-eye designer shots of Botox, pain-killers, depressants, uppers, downers, antihistamines, glazed maple donuts at two in the morning.

News Update
finished swearing up and down a Targét parking lot, phoned my friends and authored messages to an old e-mail list announcing how I’d decided to give up the whole damn thing forever, forget about whatever “it” happened to be at that particular moment, except whatever “it” was, bugged me to the height of my crotch; so I take a ride to the Wine Country. Stay in Calistoga where I soak in a heated pool, listen to frogs all night practice their croaking, and I realize they’re speaking my language (!) and I get everything they say, like love me, love me.

Parking Karma
There's a single woman who reaches into her pocket to retrieve car keys, her head lifted slightly, the angle of her chin indicates how far down the street her car is parked. Sometimes I target a car on this side of the fire hydrant near the lamppost; sometimes in front of the bakery. Today the car is outside the pizza store. I see it.

Before she slides into the front seat, she checks the meter, just to know how closely she missed getting a ticket. The thrill. She presses the car remote and pops open the trunk, places two shopping bags next to each other. Straightens a box of tools in the back.

All this time, my right directional signal flashes red stakes out the spot, warning off all challengers who idle by and drive off. It must be my RayBans. I focus again on the owner who turns the key in her ignition and buckles her seat belt. The car hasn't been washed in weeks. A gray streak cascades down the trunk. By now, she knows I'm waiting as she continues her ritual, turns on the radio and adjusts the rear-view directional mirror.

Finally, there's nothing left to do and she pulls away. Now's my chance. I pull in. I'm parked outside the pizza store. A boy standing in the doorway drips a string of cheese from his slice. I think about getting a slice, too. I look at the clock. I need to get to my group.I've been a member for one month. We meet every weekend.

I'm working to extend my parking karma range from two blocks to three.There's someone in my group who's been coming to meetings for a whole year. He can do it from six blocks off.