You return to me in fragments, in particles. In bits and cuts. The safety-pinned t-shirt from the Ritz. A favorite pale pink jacket. A silver bracelet from Spain. The slanting light in one or another of our rooms up under the eaves. The lines from movies we’d repeat The gold ring from Cape Town we... Continue Reading →
sometimes i’ll leave one cup or bowl in the sink overnight. i’ll fill it with water until it’s heavy and spilling over my fingers.sometimes i think this will be the last time for a long time to be a water molecule, this water molecule. there’s always someevaporation or breakage. some crashing and violence that leads... Continue Reading →
Just yesterday, I was a maestrocajoling music from frenziedemails, staccato deadlines, thosewho fawned for favor with miraculouslyconjured old-world blintzes and rugelachto remind me of my grandmother.Today, their eyes avert as I stealdown the halls like the hauntingflute of Ravel’s Pantomime. I had ignoredthis unspooling of my life, the oncoming quietto be filled with crisp apples... Continue Reading →
this is a poem about poverty and class. it is not about the opening of a flower, or metaphors that suggest your life is a flower opening, or astonishment at nature. so you will not want to read it, and no one will bother to publish. but the real William Carlos Williams was a radical,... Continue Reading →
when I swerved to avoid the roadkill (a fox? maybe a young coyote?) on that nameless landlocked highway we were drinking different sodas she was probably talking about how it’s ingrained in people’s minds to like summer & how when she was younger she’d snort Adderall on the neighbors’ veranda while reading their National Geographics... Continue Reading →
spills like tidewaterover rockweedand black stoneetching absenceinto their edges. it salts the skin,wears through bone,ferries memories ashoreto settle in dune grass,half-buried,stirred by wind,vanishing. not lost,but scattered.
Frost arrives without apology.The pine stands as sentinel.No bloom,no color left to lose.It asks for nothing,draws no gaze. Snow gathers where it pleases,a white cloaklaid across the sleepy earth. Branches arch;a quiet bridge between seasons,outstretched fingersbearing winter’s weight. Sparrows live through cold still,each a small note held in the hush.No pleading,no display. Even dusk passes... Continue Reading →
I still search on the bookshelf as if retrieving a lost child, a missing parent with just the right spell. How grateful I am you are still standing, though I might find you elsewhere, on some screen. I long to see your face and feel your spine, some proof that all my fermented sorrows have... Continue Reading →
After seventy-three rejections, one for each day of summer gone by, I know what the phrase means— the absence of a human voice. But to me it’s as comforting as a Philip Glass movement, as maddening as the cricket that keeps my seven-year-old awake, hidden in the rose bush, giving us nothing but unanswered envy.
Nothing morethan a glimpseof another white-belliedcooper hawk at rest along the interstate,or a no-traffic evening,that feel of heading homeas if nothing (else)had ever happened. Oh forgiveness,& understanding. Let us say grace. Let uscall it that. Now, together. Read More in Poetry...
