About the Series Open Windows showcases the best entries from a writing contest judged in three categories, as well as solicited pieces from a number of authors and poets. For the contest pieces, the best entries from each category were chosen after a blind reading, then submitted to outside judges, who were not given any identifying information about the authors of the entries. The first collection, Open Windows 2005, was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award. In 2007, Ghost Road Press will accept contest entries from April 1 to June 30. Please see the web site for more details. ghostroadpress.com/contest.htm

Visiting the Dead

New Year’s Day, 2005

Be at each angle of passing perspective,
at mile marker 33, New Mexico,
where the family planted a plastic picket fence,
white silk roses, and a cross.

They mark this small place
where the tumbleweed of the soul lifted
over its porous fencepost of flesh
into miles of chill air.

Here at seventy miles per hour
we pass,
the endless vista of mounds,
where thin range cattle witness this eroded gravesite,
and wander, focused on food, sparse as the air,
leaving hoof prints scraped away soon
by sharp blue fingers of wind.

What is left here,
after friction of element upon element—
is memory,
and the tumulus of shifting red sandstone,
piñon pines carved by the wind
as grave markers.

Sagebrush may be gathered this year,
to cleanse the place of its noisy shadows:
mile-long freight trains, eighteen-wheel trucks,
cars filled with people rushing by mile marker 33.

Now, I look over at my dozing lover in the passenger seat,
who dreams his own version of this journey.

Lovepoem to an Acquaintance

Silent, sardonic-eyed
boy in the corner—
sometimes I want
to kiss the lines that crease
the corners of your eyes,
smooth your frustration-
rumpled hair, submerge
myself into that shadowy
space encased
in the dark spots
under your eyes. I know
you and I could be
caustic
brilliant
understatedly overwhelming—
they’d all be starstruck,
sarcastically charmed—if
you would speak. I
see that thing in you
that lurks like a
shadow projected
around the borders of your body,
looms small and dark
inside you. I taste
the tea-leaf bitterness
in your silence. I
would—if I could—clasp
your head to my breast and
hold you, drink your
silence until it was gone,
taste your steeped tears.