Sea of Cortez
Excising Metastasis. White ash.
White ash, she imagines, is pity, & lingers for years.
A builder yells news in Spanish
from the neighboring beach house,
its walls sad paper standing roofless, gaping
for a sandstorm to whiteout the sun.
She imagines blind children obscured, their babble raising the sun
in orange-sash, goldenseals bursting,
the cambering yellow surface of rivers.
Evening, her legs bronzed. The fish simmering
Grouper, a name like the smacking of entrails.
Swamped in heat she stares up a palm to white-pinned stars,
dies on the most humid summer night,
is cremated & scattered into winds the desert natal, solemn,
she returns without memory of her mother’s hands
her father’s rough eye, her abuelita on Sunday morning—
Nobody’s there, her mind speaks to its absence: lines of tan, famished hills.
The sky is a gathering ash stirred & brushed to haze. The call yet to come.
The streaking geese, their cries light foghorns.
Maatthew kaler
View all poems by Matthew Kaler