Category: poetry
-
the tongue- knows only- sixty breaths before it lives, before it dies
The tongue remembers all the death it has tasted. It teaches us the name and memory of things. The aquae of the womb’s ocean as it dries in the first gasp of air. The vitae coughing out so the lungs can start its invisible cycles of dying and renewing. The taunt of the nose denying…
-
Wide-hipped Mothers and Wives
My mother was a wide-hipped woman. So is my wife. They have cuddled me in the clouds of their bodies. All of my life exists in their bigness, broadness, grandness. All of my imagination cribs in the jiggle of their arms embrace, the wide outlines of their curves, the soft pillow of their stomach. I…
-
The Art of Graffiti Removal
I always believed until long after my mother died that she was the onlyperson who loved meand thatmy father was a shriveled man at heart.Once my mother fell hard on the floorand he never bothered to lift her up orgive her a helping hand. Then my mother died andhe tried to replace her,becoming more generous,more…
-
Build-a House
I built myself a house to home my lonely bones,a house on a noisy-silent streetopening to a quiet skyin colors my wife loves—mostly a whiteso transparently clearit absorbs shadowsfrom dark yesterdaysand sick brown partschemically cured.I built myselfa house thatunderstands my lousy Spanishand knows my gringo accent needs subtitles. I built myself a house with big…
-
Leaves Falling for the Fawn to Graze
Leaves were falling from the great oak at the meadows edge, falling from all the treesthis cold cold night.So many have fallen off,so many were torn off,that the new buds to come were but a memory of a sun that once shoneand gave them warmth,warmth they needed again.They’ve fallen down unaware of the secretblooms yet…
-
Dead Old Hearts for Auld Lange Syne
Dead love was the grief that brought her down.She buried him oft in her heart’s graveat night ‘neath the Noble fir near her front door.Dreams had him smiling wide-eyed in the morn. Her da followed rudely into her futureseized by fevers and chills she couldn’t shake.She left him boggin’ near the auld grapeuntil he popped,…
-
Winter Solstice
In indifference comes my winter solstice—my life now groping more dark than day— just one less even second now—to a temperate gloom and a forever stasis. I neither want to live shorter than my mothernor any longer than my father—an oh so happy mean is just my preferred destiny— death at eighty on an overcast…
-
Dia de Muertos Cancion
I feel my father’s ashes on my tongue.His strange death sitting on the edge of my teeth humming that oldSpanish balladthrough the night’s fog. The song you so hate,yet love.He sings it in his own perfect pitch.He sang it for my mother years ago.I hum it off key, hearing his lies.
-
The Gifts of the Magi: An O’Henry Christmas Poem
I don’t remember their names yet I witness their shattered tree being placed in the old bent stand.Its wind-shorn branches supplicate to the sky. Placed beneath its boughs area Red Cross box and stained pics, the bluegrass relics of father, mother and infant son— all exiles from my wife’s side of heaven, huddling like a…
-
Living With the Disappeared
Each of their syllables floats into the ether leaving memories of little talks, of things not said, until the letters separate away. mother to other drifting away other, other- “Momi, donde esta?” Father ather falling further down at her, at her- “Papi, quien eres tu?” They didn’t fall. They were thrown to leave me without…
-
Son of Monarchs
The monarch flutters above the ash and in its black and orange beautyexists all day and night. It flies up to meet the sun,the gentle maternal hand of life lived in the light.Only the scent of milkweedlures it down to ground for the paternity of feasting and breeding.In its flight between earth and sky, I…
-
Leaving Tranquility
Not far from the cove, the stones worn smooth from the tides weeping, the salted breeze, removedfrom all tranquility, is the grand windowed house. The ashes will be spread on the beloved soil,the October browning still green to cover this assembly of forgetfulness. The house awaits the noises of the feast,the jeer, the final clearing…
-
Palinode
pal·i·node/ˈpaləˌnōd/nouna poem in which the poet retracts a view or sentiment expressed in a former poem. My father stands in my memory seriousness, good intentions intact. He has shifted in my time from distance to closeness, shed his professional ambition and all his focused successes to enter my life still wearing his white coat and…
-
House Ghost
My new home needs some ghosts!The ones that hover in memoryand find their way to the floorboards,a patina of cremains that creaks with old joys, hurts, triumphs and defeats—the bark of good boys sitting patiently in their mahogany box above the dust of Cleopatra in her oaken tomb,always the silent bitch with the sad brown…
-
Listening and Searching through the Rubble
They called off the search to wait for the winds to pass,the demolition to collapse the weight of concrete onto flesh to make it safer for the cadaver dogsto locate their scent amidst the rubble.They called their names out bothin English and professional Spanish,mainly for show, mainly a memorial,loudly at first, then just a mumbled…
-
Homeless
It’s hard to know home without rootsfirmly planted in the soil of stay, when cancer and cure move the lifeline.and a tornado the geography of property beyondthe winds of summer squalls and hard rains.My heart is not a sedentary plot.it knows no fixed seasons:winters blow into summersand summers into winters not allowing me a crag…
-
I Know the Night and Sky
I have cried,I have grievedand therefore I have loved.I have twinned my existence:once in the joy of life and the other in the nacre of cancer.I have seen death, known it’s slow, sad and sometimes violent approachthrough the collapse of everything alive-how it roams throatless,holds tight,then lets go.if there is no heaven full of sunbeams…
-
Wrestling With a Stained-Glass Angel
The Holy Ghost is freely pinned as sin is from the Devilamongst the broken back pews of a somnambulant congregationdreaming of the post church pot luck buffet.Release it to the wild,it flies to heaven,anointing a stained-glass angel peeled from the wall as second.The angel says,”You must wrestle me,”I dream of catching the uncatchable,holding that one…
-
A Mother’s Bread
All life mother kneaded him from her ma’s-g’ma’s pain and joy,from the bodies who all knew her into the one she knew well,collected from all the raw bits lost, found, saved from breads baked-unbaked,while the yeast swelled her stomach and pocked her skin. She said, “Eat, child,”and he fed ‘till her flesh broke. In the…
-
Mother’s Day/Mother’s Day Not
Is it so terrible to mourn a mother,to cry for the ones that shut the door and never returned,those never equipped to nurture a newborn from birth to death,the ones who desperately wanted to be mothers but couldn’t be,those who lost a child or never wanted to be mothers but are—should this be a day…
-
Pain Knows the Wolf
I should have broken my back by nowwith my lupine spine, feet screaming as if in a wolf trap. My outrage prowls the low valleysearching the arid land for water to slack the thirst,the howl inside.Once there was real silencebut no answer.Now, rage is my lone truth.The lamb has been eaten.Nothing stays in my broken…
-
A Visitor in the Target Moon
Brother, I await you outside the windowamongst the night traffic zoom and scent of pine,story sitting on the throat’s knife edge,the truth unable to roll out from blood fear. Mother, I feel your harsh breath outside my soul.Father, your praise is hidden in the hot stones.Brother, the moon slices you,tripling fear across the unforgettable,a memory…
-
Super Nova
I destroy the gold house inside my soul— the nova of light ongold archway, gold mantle,gold walls. The last bits of real places that once shined.l thought, forever in the aura of sun-shine on oncegold rooftop, gold windows, gold doors. Look in,search and see, find: black gold steeped in the darkburned down to ash ofgold…
-
On Seeing My Mother’s Clothes on Someone Else
It appears just weeks after the last tear,my mother’s sky blue dress on her life ghost:same walk, dove shape, soft voice, brown hair cut short-at least from behind, in the same love lightthat moved from donation bin, rack, to herin the way that the poor are damned to wear the dead’s clothes, hand me downs…
-
When I Am Among the Trees (not after the poem by Mary Oliver)
When I roam the real forestgrumpy apple trees spit their spoiled rotten children on my shoulders knowing I will collect them and mash their cores into cider.Their leaves refuse to form shadows nor shade me, letting the sun scorch my monk’s crown deep cardinal red.The weeping willows shed snickers not tears.The oaks refuse their goodness…
-
To Eat a Peach
As I exitthe world of green dinosaursfused from abandoned rusty automobiles and steaming in the sun,a child offered me a giant peachharvested from a Palisade treegrown in the valley’s katabatic winds. It tasted of harsh-sweet stolen pleasures,lust and greed and love and dried fruit,full of Ute tears and diverted waters,memories between prayers and laments buried…
-
Always Previously Owned
After Adam died Eve designed a house of wooden ribs. 2 She created it to never burn down. 3 It was full of happy walls and bright colors that never faded. (The next owner painted them gray.) 4 The rainbow colors would daub off on every guest’s fingerprint, an intended souvenir. 5 Nautilus shells placed…
-
Homeric Simile
As when his son, a pensive animal lover,on his first hunt,had to face the doe in his scope,his first kill lined up for the taking,breath held firmly before trigger plunge,the forest circling, fear trembling his lips, doe moving from view, gaze,his father behind, a looming granite mountain crushing himlike an avalanche of scold that he…
-
The Projection Room
If lucky I will die in a room of non-hospital green, on plump pillows, good linens, with good family and good friends,the ghosts of loves, the odoramaof nitrate seas, forests or mountains on walls.Room where well-cast dreams lived and died. Will my death be the end of a long love,mystery, tragedy or comedy,flashback to life…
-
The Dig
Blow the dust of history off our bones. In the excavated ribs of ancient sailing shipsfind the burial chambers of kings. Blow the dust of history off our bones.In the dig just below them, but just over the rubble of the blitz are the cracks in the golden cathedral’s dome.Blow the dust of history off…
-
For My Unknown Anniversary
Every year I knowingly cross the unknown date that will complete my tombstone,the day last fires will turn ice and my deafness will make the silence my true and final friend- and I will cradle the earth that cuddles my mother.Maybe I will share that anniversarywith her or some dear friend but undoubtedly with other…
-
The Forensic Cleaner
they took the body out but the blood/bloodstain stayed there. the investigation begins. that’s the police’s job. but after the death the cleaner cleans. he cleans up blood, pieces of bone, skin, maggots, flies everything that a corpse/body leaves behind. the smell of decomposition/death will be gone by the time he finishes…
-
Only God Knows Dove from Spoon, Man a Hawk from a Handsaw
“I am but mad North North west; when the wind is Southerly, I know a hawk, from a hand saw.” (Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2) Only God sees and knows dove from spoon, can feign the smoothness of heaven, let the mind see hawk and handsaw open in the wide shed behind the house,…
-
Dead Flowers in Small Arms
I did want to do it with dead flowers the pressings of leaving here— flowers made of truths held openly in front from a fallow field left to nettles, the broken pebbles hammered by a vengeful sun. I plucked it up, plucked the good root of all our great hopes and best dreams and watched…
-
Knowledge
he knows the earth beyond all seeds the earth that is untroubled in the scorch of afternoon light the petals of the angry sun
-
Doves Always Return
On the white dry limbs of the sycamore, disrobing bark etiolated in spring flash, three doves roost. “Peace,” they coo to the desire of my heart to calm the violent world so like the Lord’s small ship in the tempest ere the rebuke of wind, sea, the faithless in their fear. I will…
-
Daylight Saving Time
The clocks leap forward and I fall back looking for you to return from dust blessedly at the stroke of two this night. ¡Despiértate! (Wake up!) Es muy muy tarde Madre Mia. (It’s very very late My Mother.) Gather yourself. School is over and it is time, not too too late for you to teach…
-
The Great Tornado
She knows the winds in the circles of all that’s around her. The funnel is as twisted as the screaming man on the wall hanging in the serenity of white space, crosses and orbs flying up like zephyr elms. Her face breaching its anvil. Her little brick house pirouetting…
-
Memory Jug
When I die fill my memory jug with things my mother loved. Leave out her tears, the shivering in the rain. That heart on the silver cross, keep it, the scrap she wrote my future name on, the ink footprints on my baptismal certificate. But not the bandage from my first…
-
Flying into the Demilitarized Zone
The eagle brushstroked black talons to beak broke red blue in the white sky tiny scarlet prey fought and died in once soft grasp matron touch a child freely loved plumped fed and feathered in aerie tall safe high from screech and whoop the drop to the loops of barbed wire below
-
Bronze Disease
Put two copper artifacts next to each other, and in time, they will turn green from the attraction. Bronze Disease is what the conservators call it. For them, corrosion is the enemy. But that is not true, as poets and most others know: Corrosion is life, Rust is love.
-
Never Call the Evil Whales Forth By Name
Never summon the evil whales forth lest they hunger for a salt’s murder or seek to ravage their ship. They cry out havoc, scream tempest to the ocean and sky so the illhveli hear not their name. Their harpooned blubber boils neither to heaven nor hell but vanishes only inside the soul. …
-
Self Portrait
I walk from there to there to paint myself into black pixels, my shadow following obediently part of the hobbled sketch. I draw myself as a wobbly line, ill aligned and always misplaced near the horizon Above are scrawled illegible words written in a shaky handwriting, below exists the gurgle of my bowels…
-
My Google History
I search Google Sky and there is a night picture. Yellow dots top and bottom in fluttering butterfly waves: too many to count, small red and white dots: 20 per square inch, medium red and blue orbs: 10 per quadrant, red orbs with devil’s tail: 10 falling down red, purple, blue orbs with halos:…
-
The World Is Louder than You
Everything louder than the earth spinning under you will make you doubt you are alive.
-
Icarus, She Flies
image: Jacob Peter Gowy’s The Fall of Icarus (1635–1637) A daughter dies, and she is found, in the cerulean movements of birds. Not a hawk. Mother Sky says those are for boy’s souls. The father sees mockingbirds building a nest of pine twigs in the corner frieze of the portico and imagines a flash…
-
Not a Bird Song
The not not bird listens to its not not song in the not not tree near my not not door. And in its song it hears something not not grand compared to all the other not not birds in all the other not not lands. The not not bird doesn’t know all…
-
Persimmons and Pomegranates
I. All through elementary school blonde beautiful lip reading teachers would try to correct my “th”s by snaking their tongues between their teeth and holding it there, ripe cherries tempting me to bite into them. This was the one thing my withdrawn self throbbing with the first thrusts of male enthusiasm couldn’t stop thinking…
-
Sentinels
The sentinels stand silently guarding the monuments from rioting against their shadows. One guard counts the sunshine, the other the dark. The piss and shit, the broken glass can never be really cleaned up. The stench just follows the tour through the purple velvet queue. The glass bleeds the feet of those who sold their…
-
Where Waldo Is Not
The greatest where’s Waldo paintings to be have him the tiniest spot at the very top in a population of near clones. After searching everywhere he will be the last thing you’ll find, the last thing you’ll see. Your life will have meaning again after generations of searching and playing the game. …
-
Housekeeping
We birth a thousand destined broken things: chair legs detach from their seats under the weighted repetition of sitting cloth itself threadbare from the rubbing of muscle. We glue together the blue China fallen in grief. The silver nails of the crib are reserved for our rusty coffins. We mend…
-
Steve Earle Sings His Son’s Songs
“Don’t make me bury you,” the elder spoke to the younger over the phone, knowing that his child had inherited all his demons. “I will support you if you want to do rehab,” he whispered, that old Harry Chapin Song, Cat’s in the Cradle, about fathers and sons circling in his head; his…
-
A Gun and a Hotel Bible
No bad guy talks alone to a Bible in a hotel room with a gun in his hand. “If a man commits adultery with the wife of his neighbor both the adulterer and the adulteress shall surely be put to death…” the good book says or he thinks in a cold sweat. …
-
The Star
It comes like He came on the longest, darkest night of the longest darkest year proclaiming all the glory of God and the beauty of planets and suns. The old gods have been exiled to the sky and their movements are barely the echoes of the Grand Breath. Apollo and Selene have long…
-
All Creatures Great and Small
For a week a blue fly buzzed around our apartment subsisting on our Pomchi’s water, kibble and kitchen counter crumbs and dodging attempts by my wife to swat it. I used to catch flies quite easily in my palm and release them back to their natural estates but since my colon surgery the bugs…
-
Wolfwalkers
The town exists in harsh geometry, the forest— a fiery flow. The wolf leaps above their soul, a crescent moon. Run the wolf. Flee the wolf. Don’t go beyond the wall lest you be devoured. When the wolf howls they make work their prayer, their protection. They pray a whole…
-
A Wedding Dress Story
She didn’t want this wedding dress to be a widow, alone, encased in plastic in the unused dark of the closet, moved after spring cleaning to the basement near the leaky window, after five years moth-balled to the old unopened hope chest of her mother’s closet, weeping, weeping, weeping for the man she lost, subsisting…
-
Living All the Eclipses
As the moon dips behind Earth’s faint outer shadow in penumbral eclipse an imperceptible darkness seizes my soul in fear I wait futilely, like the ancients, for the next blood red cycle to engulf the world in ignorance and violence, the next monster to bite the earth into a crescent slice. They once…
-
Going to the Sock Hop by Herself
She dances alone, the black child in the yellow dress. Alone amongst the black and white oxfords, the ivory Buster Browns, the brown penny loafers with smiling Abe Lincoln’s looking up to her from the confines of their penny keepers. Her white socks touch the polished mahogany hopping silently to the beats…
-
Small Axe: Lovers Rock
The music is the scent in the air that changes everything. “I’ve got no time to lie, I’ve got no time to play your silly games,” it croons with a sweet she reggae lilt pairing off the lovers from the pretenders, shedding bodies to kiss and writhe in adjacent rooms or the nearest alley until…
-
Identifying Features
My mother wanted me to go away. I hardly sent her anything. From behind, we all look alike.
-
Thanksgiving for Two
Due to the pandemic the children are not coming. The adults will set a table for two and wait for the zoom chat after the game with the Dallas Cowboys and the Washington Football Team formerly known as the Redskins. They will double their Thanksgiving feast of Burger’s Hickory Smoked Spiral Sliced City ham,…
-
Small Axe: Mangrove
All you wicked men what is wrong with you? There is no black Justice seen on the Sistine Chapel. Only the stupidities that can make a stuff bird laugh- the small axe ready to cut the big tree down. Based loosely on theSteve McQueen anthology of films. The first in the series is…
-
Sitting With My Mother
In the early morning rise, my mother and I take a ride to the hospital where I was born and she has her dialysis treatments. Her feet, wrinkled and bruised, exhausted are raised on a leather pedestal. They remind me of Grandma’s heavy black nylons that pooled around her ankles as she prayed…
-
Arcane Torso Mistakenly Posted to Pornhub
The steel bar that holds the torso up gives it a spine and makes it art and not some headless, armless, genital-less mutilation pushed from a machine going faster than the white signs allowed. I see it only on my iPhone, backlit with its perfect abs and cum-gutters not unlike the headless fuckers penetrating endless…
-
Defining the Difficult Word Inside Her
I plea for my mother’s spirit to wait for me before the ascension because I want to know more beyond her sun, moon and stars; for her to show me the other colors hidden inside her; shades my crafted words can only reflect in broken shards. She draws me a symbol for a word…
-
Meghan Places a Poppy on John’s Grave
On the 11th month, the 11th day, at the 11th hour, Meghan wore her poppy on the right side at 11 O’clock, just like her father, John McCain taught her. Holding her newborn girl Liberty close to her— and taking care not to disturb the many small flags proudly fluttering— she placed another poppy exactly…
-
Time Pieces
I. 1. The poem parses time into syllables and the syllables reach out to hold you in the embrace of your grandmother’s words, the light touch of motherly praise, the squirm of a daughter’s protestations, the first gurgling phonemes of the womb advancing to meaning, dissolving to memory. 2. The grandfather clock travels in grandfather…
-
Blue Shoe
The blue shoe on the side of the road had me wondering who it belonged to. Yes, shoes are made for journeying, poised for leaping not yet taken. They shine with this potential right off the factory line. Yet, this orphan once so stiff when young, once a tender, warming friend…
-
Cairns and Crows
The cairns are mothered by murders of crows— four stones as black as raven eggs, others sky blue with specks of black, pointing this way to heaven, pointing this way to hell, or is it to Tecumseh’s grave, the bones of all buffaloes? But then crows are great tricksters, erecting…
-
Sea Church
Rising from the watery mist the grey sea church blesses the waves and prays to the sky, lonely, unadorned, a silver carven wing, folded in limbo, as its sea bells peel out the redemption of sand and stone. Its three pillars drawn from sea’s breath are stained aquamarine, and on its grey stone altar,…
-
La Isla de Munecas: A Day of the Dead Poem
Orphaned from the girl who bought and loved them the dolls were packed tightly into a suitcase and floated gently down the canals of Xochimico to the Isla de Munecas and into the waiting embrace of Don Julian Santana Barrera. In the unpacking, a girl doll, a life-size two-year-old, with a dress, hand-work all…
-
Piano Fade
The piano player has already been shot. He is no longer a musician, less one that sold-out halls. Once he turned the river’s chant into a jazz so fine that fish weeped. Now, he plays only right-handed counterpoint. His left is still paralyzed, even after a year of PT. He only…
-
Breaking Horsepower
The black stallion runs onto the tracks headlong into the train’s cycloptic light attempting to break its horsepower. He refuses to yield to gravity touching his feet and grounding him into mammal again: sweat, hair, lungfuls of air, refuses to slip his nose through another hard halter. His head and hind legs…
-
Clutter
It soothes me to keep the clutter of the past in picture albums on my cell phone: mother’s yellow dresses, ashes in weighted urns, brittle birth and death certificates, enough heirlooms to make a portable history, things heavy enough to resist memory’s drift, for when the hills blaze up and I have to evacuate, leave…
-
The Cursed Land
Long the land watches for death or harvest amongst the lulling black mounds a slumber in piles, huddled so neatly without blankets from the shivering wind blowing meanly under the sway of the killing night’s climb. Underneath are all bones, life clutching the long tilled soil, the farmer’s harlot oft despoiled, denied wages, seeds…
-
The Great Horned Night Owl Screeches My Name
The Great Horned Night Owl screeches my name and I whisper back that it’s wrong. Look around the block, across the coast there is the soul that you seek. She shifts to the closest oak limb tapping just outside my window. Bruja Buho both witch and owl my grandmother called her, …
-
Drownings
It’s easy for them to slip into the ice, the big crack of nonjudgmental water, absorbed entirely in the joy of now. First winter blankets them, then the frost, the quiet, until the last of their woolens, the black and red squares of their scarves, their blue and pink pompoms trailing down become the…
-
The Blue Lurch of Train in Time
-
Black Pieta
Strange fruit lives in the bones of black mothers, the blood of their sons, marrow of their daughters. Blue winds drift by full of poplar scents, aromas that never leave the maternal soul. They exhort their sons to be careful, be safe, make it back home. They know they…
-
Living in the Mermaid’s Shadow
I watch my love, almost a mermaid, standing in the kiss of shoreline and ocean, washing sand from her glistening form. In the pause between tides I tie a hope line, strong as my inglorious life, to her toe. She swims through it, hardly noticing my intent, only her friends crowding around, reflecting…
-
Heartbreak (poem)
Losing a child never known a mother known love found love lost memories remembered memories not remembered old man’s tears grief in womanly rags heartbreak
-
Flowers
The only choice is blossoming in the terra cotta …
-
Orphans
1. The motherless-fatherless God orphans the world in His own image, His experience, His own elevated thoughts. Yet He is unsatisfied, unhappy for His creation is not perfect enough. Even the little man with His breath-spark is an unfulfilling design, in tun dissatisfied. Everything has weight but nothing has fullness. …
-
Moths
Luna moths flutter in the captive night light of early December, strong, determined to mate their way to the electric crackle (invisible as a secret trapped in the soul) emitting from the machine in the eaves. Their disintegration illuminates the dark with ultraviolet pulses and heavy musk drifting to mouthless, abandoned mates, antennae feeling…
-
Paper
There is a certain satisfaction that comes with shrinking language and imagination to a rectangle, fitting black-and-white words into a prescribed length and width given human depth through inscription. The filled sheet of paper almost transcends its smoothness and thinness, its very blank expression and dullness. It reveals exactly what it is meant…
-
River Ode
The lavender skin river whispered with a maiden’s call. Bonnet curls kissed her banks in a flush of forgiving tears for the trawlers bruising her mercy and calm, each departing an oily scar that dispersed in the flow, for the water is never mean this cold season to those that whip her …
-
Casting
1. If there is wild moving water there is a trout in it waiting for the cast, the whip of line in air splashing a weigthless fly on the mirror surface luring the rainbow fish to break the heavy air for the angler’s fantasia. 2. The Rogue…
-
The Yellow Bus Stop
The earth is black on both sides. The yellow bus taking the living away passes pile after pile of rubble, of signs that were once there: the Harley Davidson store, The Rogue Action Center- a nonprofit climate change group, the community bank – it’s vault the only thing standing. Indistinguishable from the ash is…
-
The Dead Mother’s Children Kneeling in Love
White and red roses defend the mother’s coffin: cherry stained, her interlocked hands in prayer draped in veil gauze, her gold dress the same she married in, as the procession of her children grieves in a black and white flow. In a black and white flow, each child lights a votive candle that…
-
Memory Monster
The memory monster haunted Mavette on the platform, the gym, pass the graveyard, scolding her for leaving the tiniest remains of food on her plate, scourged her for reading that dirty Jew, Levi. The swastikas chased her in her dreams. In her hole in the earth the dogs and stamping black boots would pass…
-
Pareiodolia
The sand holds our faces. Every thousand grains forms a man, a woman, a child. Every millionth there is your mother- young, stunning, beauty mark perfectly spotted on right cheek. Every billionth adds a little weight, gray, tears and beaches of separation. Every trillionth might be the dirt blown away at…
-
Plum Juice Runs Happy
You worked hard for the plum, to bite into the Mariposa before the heat comes and it rots. Its purple plumpness pulsates with juice, so dark and clear through and through. The comfort is not startling. It’s the taste you know from a thousand memories, What takes you back is the shock…
-
The Blue Fish
I watched in the swirl, the blue fish paddle steadily away from the boat, knowing that it had been hooked before, the wound protruding wormlike from his jaw. Today would not be his last fight. He would not be a photo prize. He wanted not the weight of air, just the restless, endless flow…
-
Take a Stand
https://twitter.com/i/status/1304186433054420992 With the start of NFL football yesterday, I must salute those brave and patriotic players and teams who take a stand against police brutality of black people. I must share this poem and video that my Miami Dolphins posted on Twitter. I stand in complete solidarity with the Dolphins on this issue. https://twitter.com/i/status/1304186433054420992 It…
-
Smashing Glass
Smash the glass if you must, yet do it gently using soft hammers. Catch the fury in your breath and release its image on the pane. The goal is not destruction but creation, to leave behind something cracked yet still whole, hanging precariously together, a reminder that we are all shards about to fall. Tap…
-
Abandoned Boat
The Little Bessy molts its white chipped, dull letters out to waves it cannot use. Capsized on the rocky Maine beach, where it once fished for lobster in richer anchors, the peapod displays its tattered nets on its hull while the Man O War, filled with a haul of tourists, bruises the gentle waves…
-
The Chair and the Light Pulsing on Its Rails
Abandoned in the middle of the blasted field, its arms shredded, legs battered, the chair exists in broken splendor catching the best of the speckled light dancing in the quivering shadows. Lines of the seated father stain the backrest, motherly molds are left behind in the seat foam, the relentless kicks, tattoos of children’s feet…
-
Living With a Rusty Christ
The clean church Christ hangs on rusty nails, dozen-fold years denied a resurrection, tied to everlasting pain and death, heaven denied, mortal redemption denied because the flesh, existing between hope and despair, refuses the soul’s release. The congregation is dead to peace, only knowing the scrapping of their knuckles on the smooth stone- dead…
-
The Driver
The bus driver sees people as they really are: survivors & corpses going for regular treatment, shadows & lights moving in a tunnel, loved & loveless reflections in a rear view mirror, like him, the sufferers of whole-body vibrations of the potholes & uneven pavements of the road, the sedentary motion breaking their backs until…