My poem, Leaning Towards the Southern Hemisphere, was published in the Bay Area's POETALK magazine. The poem also appears in my new book from Plain View Press, The Jeweled Net of Indra. The poem was written during a visit to Costa Rica, while musing on the cultural differences between north and central/south americas.
Leaning Towards The Southern Hemisphere
Samara, Costa Rica
Veranda, hammock—refuge from what I’d become.
Small red frogs with immense toes sit silent
in trees nearby, poisonous, bearing witness. Forgetting myself,
I worship every cocoanut husk, green parrot, afternoon rain.
Even mosquitoes sound like singing, feel like tiny bruised kisses.
All insolence drains from my body, reverence the only tongue I know.
There is something here: milk inside the husk.
Beneath the ground, a single bean germinates.
Inside the bean, the husk, a mountain grows:
this doppelganger life--a shadow,
a savior.