Park Bench, a dangerous thing

to lie on [under normal circumstance]

he has shot me in the neck

One morning, after a night of dreamless sleep, Sasha was surprised to awaken in her bed and find herself transformed into a strange machine. Her fingers, which were once crude flesh, had become metal rods, sticky at the ends—perfect for filing. Her arm joints were soldered together on hinges. She stood up. Her breathing was flawlessly even and her heartbeat had lost its murmur. At her hips she found a monitor with mail merge on the toolbar. Sasha inspected her profile in the mirror and discovered her face to be a mask behind which gears turned in her mastoid unit, processing data received through her ocular chips. How long had this been happening? And how could she have failed to notice? Wires carried messages down to Sasha’s well-oiled toes. They moved when she told them to, but she could not feel a thing.

Yesterday, I recorded three poems for KXCI's A Poet's Moment, hosted by Ron Cipriani. It was a lot of fun. I really enjoy recording for radio. One of these poems, posted below, will be played several times this week on KXCI Tucson 91.3 FM. Ron is saving the other two for a rainy day.

If you're out of radio range from KXCI, you can still hear the program through their Web site, which streams the station live.

The following are the dates and times my poem "Willow, Alaska" will play on A Poet's Moment:

Last week, I went to Portland. I experienced the majesty of Powell's Books and the serenity of the Japanese Gardens, saw Mount Hood and even Mount Saint Helens in the east. In all, it was beautiful--green, lush, everything my native California heart yearns for after a Tucson summer.

One of the greatest parts of my trip was getting a tour of the Writers' Dojo, an enterprise that Tucson writers might be interested to know about. The dojo is a physical space on the one hand, a two-story building nestled among cherry trees and black-eyed Suzies. I had to remove my shoes to enter. The bamboo floor was cool under under my feet. Potted plants and red-gold rugs decorated the ground floor, and on the wall hung a framed quote calligraphed on rice paper: "the tears i shed yesterday have become rain."

Members of the dojo are invited to lounge on canvas and leather couches or sit at sturdy desks to read and write. Upstairs, writers enjoy total concentration in the quiet area. As I toured the grounds, complete with a martial arts center next door, I realized that I could feel quite at home in this space so carefully designed to enrich creative life.