Taylor Rosewood

The brown lady of the south is knocking at my door,
carrying bags of oranges she grows inside her yard.
It looks like a friendly gesture, but I know of her wily chops.
She's come by way of the canyons, and the friction makes her hot.
...

Amphitrite was alone due to matters of shipping-
perhaps a war or an off-season storm,
when another god came and gave her a spray,
and left her aglow on a warm, sandy shore.
...

Unheralded in life,
they don't fear death,
and leave their parents
to fold up a uniform.
...

Beatrice rides shotgun, just like a dog,
until she runs out of gas and walks home
by herself, past the cantina where where
she used to take names- sixteen and pristine-
...

Saturday afternoons mean
you push the dreaded pencil,
swirling dusky lead into periods
black as coal.
...

Consciousness is a lean-to
I've constructed throughout
the Siskiyou. It bears the
screeching of the scrub jays,
...

Youth can be a desert
where the shadows are
definitive, or a trek through
the rocks when there's water
...

Ripped from their moorings,
petals set sail, scorched and
limp in the high desert wind,
blown to the odeon, buying
...

Maria's in Guatemala still
trying to scale volcanoes,
half buried in terraced fields
of petty rage and discontent.
...

Climb that wall,
you little tendril
of ivy.
...

Turbocharged denizens eat organic,
while the stilled and the rusted lie dying
in the mustard. That's just how it is when
your face is tinged blue. You're guided
...

I'm in a garage and looking out,
counting the miles to an inflatable bed,
where I'll lay my bones in exiled repose,
and untangle myself from sticky threads.
...

If I could silence my mind
I would be like this glass,
more simple and sober
than a gray tablecloth,
...

The Klamath descends
out of Crater Lake Spring-
set free by the huntsman
tracking south with his dogs,
...

There's a nook or two
along the rocky shore,
where the lake is deep
and you look straight
...

Trickling down, I slide through hills,
and drizzle onto barefoot toes, soft
like figs, and tough like stones, yet
warm of color as true figs go, and
...

I'm life untethered, soaring upward
on itself, sharp of talon and lethal of
beak, leaving nothing in my wake but
warm blood and gristle.
...

While others may convene at the Big House,
I'd rather be at the flat chasing you,
or there on the floor with young Mrs. Krause,
while she told me all the things I should do.
...

I think I'll don a muscle
car and head toward
Huntington Beach.
...

A let down is a drizzle
of tiny cold drops,
beaded and clear
on a tattered soft top,
...