Bear’s Den

like Austin twenty years ago
weird, w/ the “cool kids”
cheap beer, dive bar, small-
town profs plus spouses

still seeking employment –
the Conway Twitties play
a goodbye show for
the departing adjunct

his partner gone already
to the Second City, he’s already
checked out, two academics
each divorced both confess

it’s awful in Arkansas
to be a single man – then
“I’m pretty sure Latino
women get me best” the fantasy

of a fall-back career or
being denied tenure so you can
go forward with living the rest
of your life past the acrylic yarn

bombs clinging to blighted trees
in Simon Park, each Fall, more
students stunned to find their
favorite pedagogues gone

Kumari

"Sometimes I don’t feel like going on my throne when mommy asks me. I’ve got to get up so early." - Sajani Sakya, The Kumari of Bhaktapur

Perhaps it was her third eye
opened inwards that aroused
Sajani Sakya to rebel against

divinity - sacked for venturing
beyond Nepali borders &
behaviors unbefitting to

a living goddess

even the hardest working
deities need a holiday – hers
a tour to Silver Springs

to screen a film about
her own existence, risking
reversion to common status

forestalling the mutation
at menarche when Kali leaves
the child body behind, her guardians

mean to purify her,
she elects for early retirement
at eleven years of age, passes

the entrance tests to middle school
where she sets her eyes on the path
of teacher-doctor-camerawoman

Inner Space

a guide aims her flashlight
at the borehole drilled
half a century before

the build of I-35, below
ground it’s twenty degrees cooler
than the blazing temps out there

the cavern where my Texan mate
takes me to find relief from heat, beneath
a canopy of pencil-thin soda straw stalactites

the Permian floodwater
maze that claimed the lives
of Ice Age species, mammoth

armadillo and sabre-toothed cat,
swamped in quicksand,
a pyramid of bat guano piled high

on the grotto floor, grows taller
with time, past the talus
cone of bone sink I spot

a crumbling tusk,
pass my tongue over a back
molar claimed by dental caries

capped one month ago
in gold, what relics what
remains hereafter