I love Cabrillo Colleg's Porter Gulch Review, a quintessential Santa Cruz poetry magazine. This is the 25th Anniversary issue, which includes two poems of mine on pages 110 and 111: Signs, and, Turning Fifty.
The link below will take you to the on-line edition:
http://www.cabrillo.edu/publications/portergulch/PGR%202010.pdf
Turning Fifty
There were omens as I traveled—
a one-armed man riding a green bike
down Main Street in my hometown.
Then again in Weed, a gray-haired man
carrying a monstrous yellow boa constrictor
wound round his neck and shoulders. It would be
this kind of year—stunning, sad—the body
compromised, but carrying danger lightly, extravagantly
as though aging were the most natural wonder
to parade in broad daylight, the strange manner
in which we become more and less of ourselves simultaneously,
no one batting an eye, merely nodding,
saying well look at that, hair, muscle, skin,
shifting, disappearing.
I know there is a young boy who never ages inside,
perplexed at how long a man’s shirt-sleeves are,
shoes too huge to walk in, pants so large
I could hide in them like a tent. The same way
my mother, now seventy-five, says the mirror lies,
because she is no different than the school girl
dangling her legs from the bench in a world
where everyone is older than you, and your body
will live forever. But we are young, still,
in the spiritual sense of still being born,
caterpillars incubating in sacks that hum
with the transubstantiation of consciousness
of leg into wing, of doubt into color so varied
that even a one-armed man would whistle
pedaling down what remains of his only life,
and the gorgeous snake, wrinkling its fading skin
into useless husk, muscles its new translucent body
into another life, and another, and another.
**
Signs
Heading down 69 South past the Choctaw Nation,
on the way to Wilberton, Oklahoma
for Aunt Opal’s funeral, I drive
through one small town after another
observing the signs of the times,
past Paradise Donuts and Charlotte’s Web Bar
in Harlyville, each a small oasis
in the boarded up broken down block.
Fuel at Lake Mystik Gas, watch ecstatic boys
cavort in four-wheel drive dirt bikes
along naked dusty roads branching
into flat horizons eerily similar
from beginning to end. Driving on,
past the East Branch Gun & Pawn,
I see old trailers where part of America
lives, a flock of black crows, a cardboard sign
announcing new peach smoothies in a dark house
leaning right, then past an urgent black and white
message announcing The Wages of Sin is Death,
then Halliburton in black block letters,
and finally, a rickety wooden sign exhorting
Wake up America, God’s Judgment is Coming.
Slapping my face to ward away sleep,
I keep an eye out for seraphim wing,
stare into the double-beamed headlight coloring
the coming dusk like whiskey.