Barrett Warner

Falling Water with Forked Tongue, Somewhere, Utah




Boulders from the last ice age


divide the cascade’s dive. I find a small space.


Why does crazy made love mean


so much with a stranger, as if the less I


know the more I feel. Sadness


impenetrable, are we friends? In my pocket


a map of a halved Korea.

Cara-caras nest a bonsai-ed pinon pine


singing love-death, love and death.


My whirl is two bumps below your nape,


One I touch, one I’m kissing.


Wing us here—Beehive Desert—where it hasn’t


misted or rain-dropped since Mardi Gras.

* * *

Ana’s Older Brother Frank

Nestor and Rey Lopez del Rincon Gonzalez—twins.

To Nestor, I said my name was Jack.

To Rey, I said my name was Bobby.

They invited both of us to a party for their sister,

Ana, her Quince Primaveras, her Fifteen Springs.

My mother, who loved the Kennedys,

bought me a leisure suit with wide mistletoe lapels.

Jack can’t make it, I said to Rey.

Bobby has band practice, I said to Nestor.

It was the first time I’d been invited

to a party that wasn’t at someone’s house.

Ana was a year older than Nestor and Rey.

Frank was two years older than Ana.

Always, always, somebody named Frank.

* * *

Barrett Warner is the author of Why Is It So Hard to Kill You? (Somondoco, 2016) and My Friend Ken Harvey (Publishing Genius, 2014). New work is forthcoming at Adroit Journal, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Entropy Magazine. The woodsy poet runs a small farm in central Maryland and can be found at www.barrettwarner.com where he blogs about Sherman Alexie and Christmas, among other sanguine topics."