New Years Eve, Oakland, Ca
For Mike


You say tonight there’ll be bullets,
knowing how long I’ve slept
under skies filled with sounds of crickets
and the steady dripping of snow-melt.
We sit on the porch steps and talk
of creeks caught in hard channels,
forced beneath the city, cascades and
rapids reduced to ripples in darkness
before they trickle into the bay; we
speak about a boy on a train platform,
killed by a cop—your neighbors,
how they poured into the streets,
past stores full of liquor and loans,
gathering speed in the confines of
avenues paved and potholed. Black
power lines sag and twist above
our heads, tangled like branches.
My voice trembles at the first shot,
a little trout caught in my throat
on its way from my belly to my head,
and for a moment I see a school
swimming above the city, bullets
glinting like fish scales in moon-
light turning slow arcs in the grey
bellies of clouds on the edge of rain.

A Tee-Pee in the Suburbs
West Covina, 1979


My father decides we are owls: Hooting,
Screeching and, Howling. I am the youngest
and don’t yet realize the error of my name:
a bird with a wolf’s voice. In a vacant room,
in a local bank, we meet our church friends:
a wolf pack, den of bears, clutch of eagles,
suburban fathers bonding with their sons.
On those nights, we string together plastic
talons on leather straps, sew patches on black
vests. We make tunics from our mother’s
dresses, drink cocoa from foam cups. In winter
our bikes become deer for the Christmas parade,
cardboard antlers on the handlebars, red
and green bunting woven into the spokes.
We pedal past families in wool coats;
Santa and his sleigh move through our wake.
In spring our tee-pees rise in the local park,
a pow-wow behind the rectory, where we dance
to the beat of a drum. Our fathers march us in
circles, talk about four men who will come.
I don’t know who they are, but I know
what to do: Keep dancing, Dad says, then fall
on the ground when they hit you. Stay silent
and don’t move until the drumming finally stops.
Dressed in black, sticks smoking in their hands,
they pretend to kill us off one by one. I fall
and my brother dances by my head: heel-toe,
head down, head to the sky. The smoke lingers
above the grass. I can hear the traffic moving,
voices at a nearby soccer game. Dad is already dead.