Slightly Used Poems/ Past Publishings

Hey! Guess what, I write. Not that I have any of it in my possession. It will be en route to me in a couple hours and it has been months since I've gone through any of it (my previous laptop crashed). I've been doodling again so new stuff will be floating around soon but I like these and a site without them would feel incomplete.

In The Grove
http://inthegrove.net/back_issues.php

I honestly have no idea what poem is in Issue 15, but it's in the mail so we'll see. This is from Issue 14 since it's sold out. Glad to see the cover graphics have improved.

Paper Umbrellas

I'm an apparition standing in the yard with the hose on
watering your clothes splayed across the lawn.
Your truck isn't parked in the middle of the street
and your keys aren't really tossed into the canal.

I'm tired of being the flat bed with the smashed Monte Carlos
and Fiestas strapped to its back en route to the junkyard.
I want to be its sister, off to the dealership to be haggled over.
But we are caught in the downpour, and I'm watching you
turn into the paper umbrella in my tequila sunrise.

The Walrus Literary Journal
http://www.fanciful.net/walrus/current/biopage_2007.html#jgarcia

Smokers

Confucius said: A solitary orchid, stands, adorning the side of a mountain, perfumes the air even in the absence of appreciation...

I sit on the same steps
where my mother sat, smoking.
I see my father pull up
and I stand to swing
open the chain-link fence.
Wilted from dollar fifty drafts
he asks me to write a poem
for his flowers,

Dahlias whose stems
used to carry water
and cure epilepsy
for the Aztecs,
Dahlias whose blood dipped
petals explode in every direction
like the fireworks I watch
from the roof top
every 4th of July,

but I like the lilies.
And as my hand brushes
the soft petals of an orchid
he tells me it's because
I'm oriental.
Because I'm Eastern?

Because I'm take out in a red and white box.
Because I'm to be walked on 'til I'm threadbare.
Because I'm what every man loves
when they've tired of blonds,
blue eyes and their wives,
and I wonder what parts of my mother
he sees
when he sees me.

I sat in the back of my mother's house
and watched her smoke cigarettes
in a room she built so nicotine
wouldn't stain her walls yellow
like the cracks of her fingers.
And she told me she used to work
in the backroom of a tailor shop
in Korea,
and I remembered those young girls
in gauzy dresses as we walked
through the night streets of Punsan,
posed like mannequins
in the store front windows,
and I ask
with too much hope-
as a seamstress?

Remembering the skill with which
her hands made new homes
for discarded buttons.
How she taught me to weave
pinches from calloused fingertips
and not kisses
into my poetry.
And she peered at me
as if I were a child again.
And I am,
still too young to hear.
I want to wash the past away from her,
but I can't
touch that part of her
without pulling away my hand.
Instead I sit on the same steps
where my mother sat,
crushing a Parliament
into a potted fern
while my father pulls a lawn chair from his trunk,
a soft pack from his pocket,
and a tall boy from a paper bag,
and I wonder what parts of my mother
he sees
when he sees me.

He asks if I've ever written
a poem about him,
and I say of course.
As he totters past me
he asks to see it.
So he can tell
our brothers from the field
and the illegal bar maids
that I wrote it for him.
And I already know that
I won't.

I sit where my mother sat
smoking Salem Light 100's
and watch my dog
Johnny eating grass;
grass he's already pissed on,
that will just make him
throw-up
and I wonder,
why we're all still doing that.