Category: Poetry

Christmas Eve

A small tree leans against a wall. The windows, frozen over

lakes. There is no sky. Day and night.

 

Somewhere, grief is a place

no one is dying from. Heavy organ music. A cathedral, hymning the half-dark.

 

If you know anything, it is that a child dies at least once

in childhood.

 

You remember snow. Its quiet. How no one came.

 

How time can make small that which is no longer small.

 

Still. Imagine it is just another night. A cocktail and a cigarette in hand. A friend

saying, take care, before putting on a coat and getting in a cab. The snow, flitting

under streetlights. The moon laid across the lake by the park.

 

Imagine a life that you wanted to be yours. How you asked

to deserve it. Blue oars. A boat on a lake clear as harm.

 

Imagine some forever no one has named

heaven. Where loneliness is a mask

one is forgiven when it is taken off.

 

The last thing said or not said. Its sudden importance.

 

And all is blue. Day and night.

And all is blue. Day and night.

 

 

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Three Poems

Aftertaste

The aftertaste of beauty is anxiety.
The foretaste of history is prediction
as if the tongues had been written on.
I had been doing the ironies
till they were flat and unwrinkled,
the cuffs standing sharp and the pleats
and the blastula beginning with a dimple.
The background of Longinus was time.
The preface on paper was illusion.
In this the figures of the fixed wings
took on the pressed faces of threats and promises,
Peregrinus naming the poles of a loadstone,
the brass of the locks bitter but secure.

 

Observations

There is no coincidence
even quirks that become tradition
are rain practicing rivers on the glass
History is all antecedents
Showing how once upon a time persists
is a pleasant fiction with variations
chorus as footnotes coconuts
starting new islands on plain paper
folded to a boat and set adrift

 

Content

If you’d just change the accented syllable
to the second we’d all feel better
Blood in its lessened pressure included
It would bring back the creek
where we’d ride past the plaster pig
in a suit to see the gathering tadpoles
redstarts starting red into the underbrush
and stingrays would come to the divers
entangled in drift nets and rusted hooks
to be blissfully relieved

 

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Blues for King Kong

the soul tends to hide deep beneath the blues • & pain has chosen to call blues beautiful • & pain could not have seen things differently • when someone owns a thing we call it their possession • & yet what do we call it when some sinister spirit has entered them?  • of curtains that are mostly drawn • of a blues felt more intimately with the eyes closed • slow song for a masochist • a gentle tapping of feet •  bassist under collagen of bones • bassist of a chest-deep beating  • & some no longer look their friends in the eyes • others have not noticed themselves becoming islands • sunlight as a clarity reflected by water • moonlight as uncertainty reflected by water • drown under sounds of a profound saxophone sorrow • soak in softening passages of pain moving through the body • a falsetto waters the seeds of anguish  • protruding from the mouth • the roots of a soul reaching for light

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Cool Side of the Pillow

Have you ever heard the sound of a screen door

closing old-timer slow?—Inching madness to the edge

of its seat?— Think of shoes on the wrong feet.

And how fingernails scratch the chalkboard

to test your impulses.  When the dog shits

in the house, and the house isn’t yours.

Lost keys. Bad haircut. Bad ink. Bad poem.

Broken tooth. Ulcer. Speeding ticket.

Bad job. Foreclosure. Your ovaries tied.

Boyfriend sexting someone else.

Your kid hates you. Your dying friend has

no insurance policy. You’re addicted to soap.

Boss screaming down your throat.

You burnt the turkey. Is it worth mentioning,

that moss has no roots?— We know something

has been tampered with, when the seal

is broken.  Only one thing to do, don’t surrender,

turn over your armor, dream a little dream.

 

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Murphy’s Law

30 rabies shots, my uncle got
when, after cornering a rat for fun,
and drunk, it lept and bit his bare chest.

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes, they
say—what can happen, will—Which is what
my dad was thinking when he passed the pub

so aptly named on the day they sawed
through my skull. This is the perversity
of the universe. You go outside

to catch your breath and butcher’s knives wink
in every window. Miles’ trumpet intones
So What while atom bombs dream of flouting

their dormancy. The night before surgery,
I lay on the plush hotel bed, staring
at a room service form. When I was

little, I was obsessed with opulence.
I wanted filet mignon, lobster
delivered to my imagined penthouse

as I watched cartoons: a toddler bobbing
along the steel girders of a nascent
skyscraper, pianos crashing down, turning teeth

into sonatas. Sometimes you have
to confront the world’s malice like a mouse
who’s been burned too many times by spring-

loaded-cheese. I remember assuming
the hospital’s food would be suspect.
Juice with plastic peel-off top, overly-

salted soup, but, I thought: that’s only
if they don’t slice into my temporal
lobe. If they don’t accidentally

give me a lobotomy, or cut my
head clean off. I’ll be lucky to gag
on pot pie while mom scrolls WebMD.
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Two Poems

On Our Date I Forget the “Birds of Prey” Exhibit is Closed Sunday

Grace is just life
caught in the throat. Imprinted
and broken winged.
Crow hit by my Toyota, muddy.
Peace and rehab three-syllable words

when slurred. Grace of certainty
in the sun’s smallness—small enough

to set behind your hand,
yet still lift like a hand
on her waist while facing a dark nerve.

 

Her to touch, a crow
not very much a crow, wingless
who must hop from branch to branch

as crippled form of grace,
as chapel wind is pious, bows
in gospel like fletching
post-launch, inalterable flight.
Who dares claim the feathers
of such a fucked-up bird for

violence?

 

Rhetorical questions claim
power from the empty, ellipses
lit like street lamps, spacing
regular pools through dark.
Anyways you forgot
your walking boots. Leave
like the cut that gliding scissors
pass. You came into this life
like chains deliver the flightless.
Like silence delivers a stillborn grace.

 

Touchpoints

The wanting child breaks a bowl
before he loses his first tooth. Research says

 

we regress before moving forward

 

the way white tides marshal themselves

before they break. A circle

 

opens into a spiral and the trauma

 

opens into an echo. But I don’t wanna

echo. But despite the begging

 

watch the hitting segue into bars

 

and showers full of right heat. The way

washing becomes a sloughing

 

or a person becomes a lesson.

 

 

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On the Levee Once Again I Walk to Sharpen

my body to a blade. Weapon for nothing. Recall my first diet,
66 pounds, my proud refusal of a fist-sized milk carton.

My mother’s sister at 40, spooning Gerber peaches
into her mouth at the family table. Recall the game

my mother taught me when I was a teenager—
—find someone on the street who has my body—

Now without her how I will sharpen. Will be
vapor. Smoke. Furious at the world for nothing.

Rushing down the year’s dark corridor, street unspooling
every morning, tracking miles.

How I craved my mother’s judgement. Be vapor. Be smoke.
Be blade. Remember how it feels to desire

nothing, not even touch’s static. Remember why
emptiness still comforts like nothing else.

I will shrink myself down to where I don’t matter.
Thumbelina, tight and safe in a walnut shell.

Yet grief thickens everything. Even the imprint of my body.

Who’s keeping count.
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Two Poems

How It Is Now, How It Was 

as a boy panning the stream behind my house 
         for the minnows that drilled 
down the current in schools. They moved as one—
         muscular, thick, sequined—
so if I dipped down, I could nearly scoop 
         handfuls of their bounty up

to my chest like some dream of my hunter ancestors
          lost in the currents 
of my DNA. I imagine desire like this. 
          But whenever I stabbed 
my hand into that glacier water, they dispersed 
          at once, every one. And this entertained me 

until the day I did catch one, held its slim, jeweled body 
          inside my fist. The thrill 
of its tail flickering inside my palm 
          like candlelight, like a snake’s forked tongue
until I unclenched my hand to let it go and saw
          it was already gone.

Nurture

 

As souls in heaven, before inhabiting their bodies, children choose 

           their mothers. I heard my mother say this exactly twice. 

Once after we had fought in the car to cut the silent ride home. 

           And once on the phone with my aunt after my cousin shot himself 

through the mouth. I was born after a summer solstice 

           under a new moon. Rain thickened the green outside my window. 

Above my crib two portraits of angels hung.
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Holiday 2

Winner of the 2021 Humboldt Poetry Prize; originally published in TFR 44.2

 

On this day that in my childhood we celebrated Christmas

I found myself this year on the Gulf of Mexico

with the sea gone as leaden as clay. It seemed to heave

with an inner dislike—at least from where I stood, three stories up

from the beach, a few expensive yards in

from the sand, the humid spray blocked

by the floor-to-ceiling windows,

and the barely moving palms. I was making

a dinner from my childhood. An egg batter you poured

in hot oil and closed inside the oven for a full

twenty minutes till inflated to crisp gold,

plus a wad of beef crosshatched and pressed with flour and salt.

As it cooked, I read my son the story of Midas, how

he wanted the idea of everything, and the lesson was

that everything was dangerous. Darwin wrote that late

in life he’d lost his taste for poetry, for the fat copy of Milton

he was said to take with him on that first trip, still particular

for all the living parts of earth and mind. The couch

I sat on thinking this was as long as the yachts

we’d seen that day at the marina. In their moorings

they were lined so tight and tidily they hardly bobbed, each the same

synthetic just-washed white and dark blue lettering.

We looked at all their given names. We saw some people walk their dog,

step off their bleached wood deck, onto the plastic dock,

as their small thing scampered merrily into the nearby grass,

the people calling after, calling after. Our boys ran ahead.

What is it to live at this cushioned here and now, these privileged

boundaries where everything that could be said, remembered,

can yet still lie ill or unexpressed: the page I read about the girls

who shaved their teacher’s head and stabbed at it with scissors,

the ink they poured upon it, I was scared to tell my husband

how it haunted me, it followed me all day, such cruelty,

and then the nothingness of ocean and the light’s jewels rippling on it,

at least on these high days when the sun shines.

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Faith Test

When the counselor asked her
disciples to gather around the bucket,
her head crowned in clover stems,
we all wanted to be anointed.
The Pentecost of chapel steps and snakes
expelled from little cabins
lined against the trees:
this was our church, our induction
into something greater
than youth group on Wednesday nights
where a teen with a bible taught us
to renounce sex, rated R movies,
the devil in a hot pink romper.
When the counselor dipped her hand
in the water we thought baptism, the bonfire
lit with praise hymns and acoustic guitar.
None of us imagined the goldfish,
its body of shingled scales,
such orange iridescent delight.
To be brave for the lord is to
combat any fear
How do you say no to a soulless tail,
the hand reaching out to say
you could be special too?
How she called on us
to grab the soft round and place it
on our tongues like communion,
like the body we cannibalized
week after week. This is the memory:
feeling the heart rate pulse
against my thumb,
the way my throat closed up
then pushed the belly down.

 

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