thunderclouds

Thunderclouds
wrestle with drops
of wet,
giant spit

that fall from the sky
and make love
to the ground.

back

Back to writing my fantasy novel.

that was nice of them.

Dear Apryl,

Thank you for submitting your work to Pebble Lake Review. Unfortunately,
given the volume of submissions that we receive, even QUALITY work often
has to be rejected. Please be assured that your submission was read
thoroughly and given careful consideration by our staff. We wish you best
of luck placing your work elsewhere.

Sincerely,


Editor, Pebble Lake Review

mmm fortune cookie.

I finished writing my article for "Writing Juice" Magazine. I have not sent it in yet today because I want to edit it first.

Almost finished with the spreadsheet for "The Rose and Thorn Ezine." Also sent in my article to "63 Channels." All they have to do now is reject it for me. :)
Sometimes I wish I had help with getting published, sometimes I want to get it on my own.

I wonder...do I really WANT to be a best-selling author? I mean, if my books sell well, and they make movies out of them, my novels will become a way for someone else to make money off of my hard work, my ideas.

But still...I have to find SOME way to pay my bills.

As they say patience is the path to all wisdom.

If I learn patience, then I will learn true wisdom.

That sounds like someone's fortune in a fortune cookie.

rejection slips.

I got like four rejection slips this week.

Go me!

aqua

6 months had passed since
that day I did not see you in the park.
It was a gorgeous afternoon
and I was
taking my dog, Her Royal
Highness, Princess of the

Dogs, for a walk. I looked for
you for two hours before
the bums came out at twilight,
and one offered to knit
me a homemade afghan if I gave
them fifty dollars. I declined, but the
word afghan made me think:
do afghans come from Afghanastan?

Do they have trees in Afghanastan?
Or toilets? Where did they get their
water, or "aqua," as they say in
Spanish, though I don't
think the Afghans speak Spanish.
Not the rugs, the country.

Princess of the Dogs--or Princess,
for short--is part Dalmation,
part Sharpee, part
something else: Chihuaha, maybe,
or Mexican.

But she doesn't speak Spanish.
I am not bilingual, though
I know a few
words in Spanish:
"Hola," "Adios," "abuela."
Water is "aqua," there is
not much "aqua" in Mexico.

Does Mexico have many beaches?
I ask a Spaniard this question--
perhaps he is a "hombre"?
He shrugs. "No, chica.
No habla ingles. No aqua."
"Water" is "aqua." "Blue" is azuel."
No means the same
thing in every language.

excerpt from my new YA thriller, "Into the Dark"

"Place is said to be haunted," Jimmee told her. "Maybe some ghost called you here, girl. Maybe you was supposed to be here, maybe someone called you here." He grinned, exposing a mouth full of cragged teeth.

Obviously she was dealing with a loony toon.

"I don’t believe in ghosts," Samantha told him in a firm voice. She was proud that her voice held steady. "They don’t exist."

"Don’t make no difference," Jimmy informed her. "Just ‘cause a man says somethin’ don’t mean it’s true. Hey, kid, maybe I’m a ghost."

He threw his head back and laughed, a cold, dry laugh. It was like leaves scraping across the sidewalk.

Samantha took a step backwards, afraid.

"Don’t worry about me, miss," he told her. "I didn’t mean nothin’ by it. Sorry if I scairt you. It gets lonely down here, some nights. Why don’ you stay awhile, girl?" he whispered, his eyes hungry and evil and cold. "It gets mighty lonesome."

Samantha didn’t answer. She turned and ran from the room, her feet pounding on the white tile floor.

She wanted to get away from this place—and the strange janitor with his evil eyes—as fast as possible.

Flower Tones

A voice whispers in the calm moving day.
We forge great shadows on hospital walls.
What sun greets us as we fought in May,
the distant Autumn whose eyes lov'd these stalls?

In yonder early light the sun still shone,
and the windless eaves beat against the back-toned thought,
in early the grass spoke that dawn was gone,
and we liv'd tomorrow in breathless drought.

So we cross great a many leaping tide,
and the seraph was ours to every faithful friend,
the depth of a wild night was theirs to hide,
and light will cross again and strengthen.

We forge each hearth on beating glass wings,
we bang on the golden at crown's distant door,
our silver slender harp as each it sings,
and tomorrow vows its fables like it did before.

When many muse we question the lion's harsh bearing,
the great beast came knocking at zealous hours.
He dregs up those songs that need the hearing,
for his words bellow strongly with the tone of flowers.

untitled

Dearly beloved, these words are not mine,
I am wrapped in a kind of
bliss utterly unlike me.

"Dearly beloved,"
I try to say, over and over again,
my words, oh my words, not wanting to form
correctly in my mouth.
They are in my heart,
not my head.

I'm the boy who's stuttered all through high school,
the freckled-faced, gangly
boy with stick-straight
legs and thick glasses, the boy who loved
science and comics and too much sugar.
Now here I am

saying "Beloved,"
as if the cat had caught my tongue,
and I'm trying to get it back.
"Beloved," I whisper one more time,
and the words curve just right.

In June I am Picking Roses

and it is sweltering.
The wind rocks me back and forth in the hammock,
and whispers:

Sleep, sleep.
I wonder if night will ever come.

A door creaks open behind me, fireflies buzz quietly.
The spaceman in the doorway
hands me stars to hold up the
moon, because I cannot hold them up by myself.

"Are stars fireflies?"
I ask the spaceman.
"No," he says, "they are flowers,
growing in a dead universe."

Fragments

Fragments.
An incandescent speck of light.
Sound, noise, the faded symmetries
of the downed hieroglyph,

another marriage on the rocks.
Forced entry. Doomsday prophets.
How obscene is the hench thug?

Open your eyes to a new summer.
Drink a little, let down your hair,
have an open conversation with the
water lilies about procreation, or
sing a sad tune about
the closing of another year.

Equinox

1.

The old man wanders from his yard.

His family, frantic, searches every hospital

within a forty mile radius.

He’s there, then he's not. Exhausted, the family returns

home to find him sitting on the couch, eating a box

of prunes.

It’s best not to ask questions.

2.

I am cornered in the house.

My toes stick out, raw from metaphors.

The warts on my feet are old and yellow, they start to

peel like a banana. I am old, I am growing old,

my memories gray as ash.

-Published in Underground Window, recently revised

The Treehouse

In my backyard, the tree
house is fringed with memories of despair.
The wind shifts form.

A butterfly perches
on the windowledge,
and is caught in an updraft.

With a slight raise
of an eyebrow,
I challenge its flight.

-published in Mageara Magazine

where has time gone

A tired man sits behind a desk in a tired skyscraper
he is not thinking of anything work-related

in fact he is thinking of last summer when he took the
kids to Disneyland,

where they got to shake Mickey's Hand and rode
the rollercoaster
that was so long ago
the kids are grown up now

Billy has a tattoo and Jenny is just about to get married,
and he wonders where has the time gone and pokes
in his jacket pocket for a slim cigarette.

-published in Winter's Light

Reflections of Morning

No, the sky was not so gray
as it was now, I glimpsed the sun
rising in the dawn, glimpsed it the way
an archeologist would glimpse the first sight
of Atlantis.
It has been snowing since 6am this morning,
and I woke up, shivering, in the dark.
Sweat glistened on my forehead and back,
it hardened into ice. I looked
like the Iceman Cometh, just before
he left for his long trip to Antarctica,
where the other iceman lived and thrived.
I wondered if the icemen had icewomen
or icedogs, wondered if there was an ice family.
It’s something to think about, you know,
just something to think about.
I had never met an iceman myself,
since I was from Cuba, I can’t survive
in the cold, I can’t live without a parka.
I turn the thermostat way up high, past seventy,
but the bill does not matter, I’m shivering
so much it hurts. The sun is out; it is not so gray;
but it is cold, and I rise out of my bed and plod
over to the shower, turn on the hot water and strip
myself naked, look at my body in the
bathroom mirror. The mirror is fogging up.
I think again of the iceman, and how maybe
they did not have mirrors in Antarctica,
maybe they looked at themselves in a sheet of
floating ice, and were never cold because
they wore furs.

can we have our ball back?

can we have our ball back?

memories, reflections.

I remember you because of tea and scones.

Gift From the Dragon

she who was born in the year of the dragon did
not know of her gifts until 1988, when her husband
pulled into a rundown gas station she sat in the car
while he pumped the gas and suddenly said,
"wait, wait, i am picturing it now, picturing
it as it could be," and then came a poem she
found beauty in that rundown gas station, found beauty in
that nothingness a year came and
went and the beauty
was still there she wrote poetry about everything
and nothing, about the clouds and the
grass and the birds and the people, she found
beauty in the simplest of things "everything and nothing is beautiful,"
she says she always asks God,
"Did You make poetry? Am I the beholder?"
she did not receive an answer, but still
she writes-still
she finds beauty where beauty could
not be found,
in rundown things and rundown people,
she who was born in the year of the dragon.