will carve new tributaries,

tear through homes,

flood the roots of trees.

The therapist tells you your mind

is swollen with doom

that carries you in its white rush,

torrents ripping through

rock and root.

I don’t know in what direction love pulls me.

But I do know the feeling of the muscle in your chest flailing

for fear of drowning.

At Minnehaha, a young Southeast Asian couple asked me

to take their picture.

Cambodian, or Lao, or Thai, or Viet.

He was heavily tattooed and looked like the dudes

who would have whooped my ass just for breathing,

back in the day.

She had dyed hair,

looked like the girls who dismissed me

as a pasty, boring little sellout back then.

They’re the most gorgeous couple in the park.

If it sounds like I’m making assumptions about them and me,

I am,

and it’s not okay

just because I’m Asian too.

They like the picture I take for them.

The creek and the falls are swollen from the rains.

The same that have deluged basements,

dips in the road,

drowned park benches too close to the lake shore.

Each raindrop doesn’t care

if it’s the one to soak in

or the one that stays above it all to flood.

They just throw themselves on top of each other

until they become bigger than who they were

when they were apart.

Chess Pride, Waverly Style

The funny thing is the local alt-weekly

mostly black and white

does a Valentine’s issue,

wants you to be a part of a how they met article.

Finally!

An Asian American couple will be featured,

you think.

Too bad you broke up three weeks ago.

Should we do our duty for the race?

Get our faces, if not our hearts, in the paper?

Take it seriously.

What if the picture

is in color?

Night of the Living

I.

There are places that were once places,

overgrown now. You can imagine lighting

a small fire amid moss-covered stone walls.

Motivational posters of eagles and canyons long since faded.

Eating jerky, holding a pistol and looking out

for danger outside the dome of warmth.

But really, once those places are given over they are done.

The comfort from the knowledge no security guard will remove you

only goes so far. You’ll start to wonder if another’s voice

would sound good in the dark echo.

If eyes reflected across the fire

could make you forget the existence of coffee.

Solitude is different from loneliness.

The abandoned places in the world know this.

II.

Edible-Seaweed Broadside in the Hour of Chaos:

I read that sea lettuce (Ulva lactuca) and dulse (Palmaria palmata) are

preferred.

Wash thoroughly of sand,

and the microscopic jewelry of small shells clinging in the folds.

Bilious green popped balloons hung to dry.

Press into brittle sheets.

For edible ink, reduce over a fire:

prune juice, red wine, beet juice, or concord grape juice

(samurai, katana, haiku—already reduced).

But what color will show up on such a broken green?