Category: poetry
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The Song of Names
It was chanted for five Sabbaths in a row in the small synagogue with the charred bimah, ashes staining the tzitzits of the rebbe’s tallit, as he raised his arms above his head, closed his eyes and sang the first alaf of seven thousand dabars, the oral memory passed down six generations, a psalm for…
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Greensboro Boys Dream on Dying February Days
1. Four Greensboro boys at a counter watch dead astronauts rain on Texas, 2. hear the scream of eight states being ripped from Hidalgo’s belly, 3. imagine themselves the first black hand to cast a ballot in front of snarling mastiffs- 4. Cochise chanting a war chant in front of white captors- 5. A free…
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Tell them about the dream, Martin
In the shadow of Lincoln he heard Mahalia shout out “Tell them about the dream, Martin! Tell them about the dream.” He remembered the vision and the words that came to him on that long walk to freedom on that 75 degree June Detroit day. It was evident as the clear water of…
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Just Mercy
Southern justice is the snake that slithers up the tree before the buzz of the lumberjack’s saw, the duck of the head to fit it into the squad car, the dark voice singing in a dark cell put on death row before his trial, convicted for the color of his skin before he was even…
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Remember, Remember Not
Remember the sky even though it won’t remember you. Know the constellations’ tales even as they know not yours. Remember the moon’s pull despite its denying your shadow. Remember the sun, the dawn even as its novas your sight, singes your memories in forgetfulness, grief and time. Remember the sunset, that…
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Diary of Your Last Breath
December 3, 2019 She was displayed before me with her eyes closed and mouth agape, leaving me to wonder whether she died in terror or awe. Was her last breath the honest gurgle I’ve been seeing for the last few days, that I took comfort in hearing restart every time I called her name…
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The Hand
Every cut is a bleeding thorn, every breath is a spread of fingers. The ear records all its silences. – Lose a hand and it goes to the trash heap, lose an ear and everyone will think of Van Gogh. – In the landfill the hand discovers fire, it discovers how to conquer the rats,…
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The Mold
I am a Vitruvian Man marked out like an anatomy lesson in black and green dye, something to align against the mean, a mold made of sheets and plastic to aim the mechanical eye to revolve its rays around. I can’t move because the machine requires mathematical silence to perform its cure, so the…
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Seeing 2020
I want to greet the new year with 20/20 eyes, knowing that cure dances on the edge of hope’s grave and that in this biblical year of flood, cancer and death, that grief is just a short term companion. Tomorrow time will step me away leaving only memory and the long walk to the…
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Mary Wept
Miriam wept. as she gave birth to her first born son in the great room of her parents windowless house because there was no space for her in their guest room. Miriam wept amidst the smell of animals lulling in the stables, the stench of blood and life, pouring from her womb in circles…
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The Two Popes
For some God comes in silence and for others it’s a saxophone solo. He’s the confession a lonely parish priest has waited all day to see and hear after lattice hours of watching smoke blow down like Cain’s rejected offering. Every soul has two Popes, both living in God but are not of it.…
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Yoda Siths the Universe for the Rise of Skywalker
The force is another Jedi mind trick that convinces the soul that all that is Sith is not necessarily sin but the whining of a baby Yoda aware of his Death Star.
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Honey Boy
We carry our fathers on our backs, honey boys to their joys and violence, absorbing their frustrations in memory or dispersing their cries into indifferent winds. Our hearts listen for the end of the cycle powerless to the mind beating the rhythm anew and the soul’s prayers for forgiveness bounded in an eternal history…
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A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood
Mr. Rogers grace exists in miniature cities of kindness, – the tranquil tones of forgiveness, level to the eye of a single frighten child. – For him, and in that moment, that child is the most precious thing in the world. – He blesses them with positive ways of dealing with their feelings; – the…
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Anne Frank Hiding in America or Breaking the Neck of Jojo Rabbit
With the sound of sirens screaming outside, ten knocks on the door, the shout of authority flooding in from the red steel, would Joe American give up Anne Frank hiding in the attic among his dusty relics, the crawl space shared with a family of rats, living under the loose floorboards among the stacks of…
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Cop Movie or 21 Bridges
Those who tread the thin blue line knows it follows through their lineage. – Strong boys become men, then become cops. The rest become robbers, the devil that stares them in the eye for the rest of their life. – If they are good they’ll get their shoot out in the slaughterhouse.
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The Good Liar
It’s hard to tell the lies of impression, the little bits of puffery that makes one look good in the eyes of a would be admirer. – One may say their name with a French flair. Betty becomes Bette. Roy becomes Roy-al, with the long affected A stretched out to tomorrow. – One may even…
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Your First Mustang or Ford vs Ferrari (A Movie Poem)
Everything is a continuous white line that goes on forever to the horizon where the next dream is always ahead. – Just you and the mustang a body and a machine moving through space and time. – Drive like you mean it. Drive hard. Drive tight. – The Mustang is a wild bronco not wanting…
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Veteran Day
The stars on the flag started falling off when Private Walker returned home to Tennessee after six months of being in country in Afghanistan. – At Camp Leatherneck on the treadmill he folded five points to pentagrams, imagined fireworks nova his welcome back. – The flag rarely flapped in the arid silence of base camp.…
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Making It- Midway (A Movie Poem)
Stella remembers when the Zeros flew thru her backyard and she saw Pearl Harbor in flames, blue bodies bouncing on the waves. – Afterward, welders melted the steel of capsized destroyers hoping to rescue any upside down survivors. – Her Billy drafted six months before would fly Wildcats in the Marshall Islands and in the…
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The Shining 2 or Doctor Sleep (A Movie Poem)
The earlier horror leaves DT a broken drunken man building smaller worlds within worlds, boxes within boxes, memories within smaller memories to keep the monsters from eating the shining he has left. – He is forever moving to the same room with different people. – “We are all dying”, he thinks, “The world is one…
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Film Noir or Motherless Brooklyn (A Movie Poem)
In the rear view mirror he can see the specters.. – her upside down reflection scatter when a foot hits the puddle… – hear the notes of a trumpet solo popping thru the open red door of a jazz club… – remembers when they whacked his partner… – and left their footprints on his ribs..…
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Harriet (A Movie Poem)
1. The biggest tree exists to neither swing nor sway, doesn’t wait for a strong wind to emancipate it from roots, to be turned into freedom papers to be torn up by the master. – The swing was created by the master, to exist until the limb snaps and the sway of blood to earth…
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Community Garden
The bulldozers and jackhammers blasted the concrete away clearing it of water, aggregate, cement, tearing it down to the soil until it buzzed with reclamation, smelled of loam and petrichor, the release of geosmin in the stirring, ozone expelling with first lightning and rain, surface bubbles releasing aerosols like fresh baked bread from the oven…
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The Singularity or Terminator: Dark Fate (A Movie Poem)
The machine that replaces you and the one that ascends you will fight it out on the factory floor. – Ultimately, it’s another machine, the gun, that will save you from a lethal precision that can cut flies in midair. – Put a hundred cops between you and the singularity and you get one hundred…
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Oncology Nurse
Every touch is a devotion, every soft phrase a prayer to life, to continue living. – A nightingale, a dove gowned in heavenly blue a ministering survival chant. – Thank you and double checks are abundant. – They minister consistent kindness for they live among the blasted. – There is no sniping, no rivalries, just…
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Okay
“Are you okay?”, my wife asks when I cough. – “No. I’m fine. Yes. I’m not”, I respond, – stumping her in the poetic irony of words that – encompass the yes and no and the in between. – She flips the finger at me and I return the bird to the nest. – We…
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The Lighthouse (A Movie Poem)
Doldrums, doldrums eviler than the devil. – The Cyclopes’ prism eye revolves around me in a mechanical chatter. – It calls out desires at night, a mermaid cast up on shore – that awakens with the caw of a thousand slaughtered gulls – sending me scrambling back to the darkness, – afraid to touch the…
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Pain and Glory (A Movie Poem)
“If you do not write or film”, the director wonders, ”am I alive?” – “What limbo am I in when the shooting stops? When my camera no longer holds the beautiful prism.” – His films stay the same, only he changes, exchanging the silver screen for glistening tin foil heated under with a match. –…
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Parasite (A Movie Poem)
Parasites: they insinuate themselves into your head, your heart, your art. – They exist in the schizophrenic zone: the lower right corner of your painting looking for patterns that go to childhood, the well rehearsed gestures that allow them to take over, plant the image in your agitated brain that makes you doubt your love,…
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Dreaming Graceland or Zombieland: Double Tap (A Movie Poem)
When you think Elvis was a fraud, a rip off the black man’s voice; – when you finally meet someone who smells like candles instead of gunpowder and whiskey; – who is comfortable with you driving that pink Cadillac all the way to Memphis; – who won’t throw your pink stuff to the side of…
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Dunk the Clown
The clown sits above the water awaiting the baptism, hurling the truth— – guessing the exact weight of the big blonde with the skinny man attached to her side like a vanishing twin, the errant throw the last spasm of a hand destined to be reabsorbed into the belly; – knocking a few inches off…
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Maleficent: Mistress of Evil (A Movie Poem)
The absence of love makes one a villain in other’s hearts. – In the proposal the weeping willow sheds its leaves to the sky, – while in the bowels below the servants of the earth forge war, – pull iron from earth as it screams to be reclaimed. – Above, silk napkins unfold into laps…
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Gemini Man (A poem loosely inspired by the movie)
It’s the mirror you don’t look into, the one without the morals, emotions, doubts and fears. – How much wisdom do you gain in confronting your older self, tailing it thru a city of statues and bridges, fighting with it in the catacombs amidst an audience of smiling skulls? – You have trained to be…
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Judy (A Movie Poem)
She always knew that Oz was a one-time voyage lasting until the red shoes dancing on and on cracks the golden road, wears it to dirt dreams, her tired legs collapsing into poppy fields, pills, her voice singing on and on in the fall until hoarse, silent and invisible. – She sings because she’s a…
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Northern Autumn and Southern Sun
The cold blows north and the city falls into the cycles of a leafless world. It feeds off the brick, licks the shoes, tastes the cotton of jackets, gnaws hands clutching the last warmth of summer close to their heart, cuddling its last embers, huddling to the next soul with faint fires when it goes…
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Porcelain Years
Our marriage is old enough to vote now and on this our porcelain anniversary I vote “Yes, I do,” over and over again. A score of fine filigree plates I will gift us, two broken to match the fragile times, the eighteen days past the towers fall when we married amidst grief and joy.…
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The Crazy Horse Monument Faces East
Rapid City wears its patriotism like a shroud. Corner streets are populated with less than life-size statues of past presidents squinting at the distant Black Hills where the grandeur of Mt. Rushmore casually crumbles their bronze dreams. Wax settlers, loggers and gold miners stake claims with souvenir hunters touring a mine, panning for fool’s…
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Ad Astra: To the Stars (A Movie Poem)
Each launch begins with a prayer until I have a puncture, a rip, a tear. Mayday! Mayday! Mayday! I am always falling either to the earth or to the stars, falling forward to God the Father or father to son. To survive I move in the vacuum between calm heartbeat and silent in-breath, …
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Down Flight
The lightness of paper soft enough to crumble to a chirping palm ball released into the air, an imagined perfect pitch, too gossamer to float to its ultimate arch, unfolding in the web of alluring sunshine aspiring to be in its unfolding angles a thread of silk caught into the patterns of a…
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Death Mask of Ours
I collect the death masks of everyone I see, many ready with their mouths turned to the earth, eyes closed tight in hellish denial. Except for L’Inconnue de la Siene pulled from the river in utter peace, lovely as Ophelia floating in the reeds, the resuci Anne of two centuries of death and resurrected respirations. Her…
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All This Chemo Is Making My Brain So Bright
Death, I notice, often comes with a smile and a kiss, a tender tuck of blanket into legs, a pull to the shoulders making shroud complete, a tender whispered secret. “Good bye” or “Good life”, it might be saying. But so does love. 2 The light of the cancer center is…
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Returning to the Invisible
I watched my house recede to the invisible as the water rises and the slow flat boat ferries me away. My only baggage— the wife in her angels nightgown, my chihuahua, a revolver loaded with dusty bullets— all collapsing in the flow, dissolving into rot and mold, a place not all that comfortable…
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64
Today I’m 64, complete with 64 shades of cancer, a strike, summed together a perfect ten, long as the feet of a bowling alley, gentle and delightful as the 64 centimeters of a lady’s footstep, filled with enough sadness for 64 six word stories about grief, grateful enough for 64 poems of joy and thanks.…
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The Numbers
I can’t walk into Walmart and not scan for shell casings, see the bruises on the fruit and think of those who fell, those now populating its aisles and borders and calculate if it’s a number worth the killing when the man in a heavy jacket with a bulge, ramrod eyes and spine level as…
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Dog Acts
I like America’s Got Talent, especially when they have dog acts. I love dog acts. I cry at dog acts. I wish dog acts would bark and chase those young kids and aspiring adults who sing opera every year and get into the semifinals off the stage; chase the pretentious dance troupes and acrobats;…
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The Port
The port rests on my high right chest, a pink crater, a cleanly folded linen shroud kissed with tears wheeled from operating room to recovery by melting folds of scrub blues with iodoform scents. The fragrance of me is creased into a tucked blanket, monitors on my legs and arm caressing rhythmic, sounds dissolving…
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Everything Is You
Kiss me. Devour me. Press yourself to me until inside and forever let me know you are there. Every breath is you. Every smell is you. Everything I taste has the savor of you. I look around and everything is you. Noise settles into the house with the timber of you. The gentle cloth of…
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A Dying Poet’s Final Sonnet
Bury me not in a high tomb of gloom on days sacred to all your lonely heart nor scatter my ashes in the pale moon on June’s or September’s early-late start. Mix me in with all my good beastlies‘ dust, one third reserved for Elsi’s sweet embrace, two parts crushed into diamonds that not…
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Neil Armstrong Takes Back the Moon
Days before liftoff Neil Armstrong saw Easy Rider in the cool solitude of a dark space 25 miles from the launchpad and Born to Be Wild blasted in his ears as the Saturn V lifted him with the drive of over 400 sky blue corvettes towards a lunar orbit almost four days later. Space was…
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The Nacre of Cancer
I have no taste for whiskey, although it seems over the years I have developed a proclivity for cancer, for building the nacre into pearl. It’s funny how one can live with death scooted to the borders, listening to it rap the door with sub-audible gusts that only your dog hears and barks at.…
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Icarus’ Sister
Jacob Peter Gowy’s The Fall of Icarus (1635–1637) Icarus’ sister exists only in living stone, the watchful daughter of the craftsman in the middle of his own labyrinth, once his prized creation, placed in the prime line of his drafts, design, eye of his genius, now a relic existing in a dusty nowhere cobweb corner…
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He Writes, She Dreams Their Sentimental Song
These are the things he scribbles in the little white paper of his brain: catch the movement of passing shadows in a window; search the clouds for the feathers of a robin’s wing; listen in the spaces of music for the laughter of angels in hiding. These are the things she knows today, yesterday…
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Catacombs Know No Smiles
Catacombs are full of bones snuggling in the disgrace of others. Hipbones piled on top of skulls, the absence of lower jaws denying the departed a smile, the eternal existential joke of insulting the living with the knowledge of their ultimate end. Femur, skull, femur skull is the monotonous pattern of the Paris catacombs.…
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Snapshots of New York City in Stride
At lunchtime pigeons and pinstripes dance with Rockette syncopation in front of Radio City following the lead of thirty balloons encased in vinyl tugged down the 50th Street station. A chauffeured limousine pops out a freshly groomed and leashed Pomeranian seeking reunion with her dowager owner getting purple locks and cuticles nearby. At…
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The Fossil Soles of Refugees
A fossil in foam, five toes under a formed sole, preserves the flight of a thousand border treks. A layer of thermite and blood settles the right pad of every hastily fled soul, a rusty preservation of the ash of those who were enflamed. Their left clod is encased with the dirt of…
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Tiananmen Knows No Ghosts Now
Tiananmen Square is a clean place today. Everything is swept before it can dirty in the history of place. No sign exists of the tanks that rolled, the man in front of them, the blood that flowed like red sorghum seeds. The cracked bricks have been replaced with new tera cotta tiles. …
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Teacups Over Yellow Stars
In the stillness of a teacup morning in Amsterdam a crowd with yellow stars query each other, a collapse of suitcases and stuffed pillow cases huddled under a gas lamp at a corner square, while those in the stories above slowly turn away. A few days before the yellow stars were twenty-one children with…
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Last Ride on the Arkansas
On her last ride on the Arkansas river, she watched the world turn crooked, all the hickory shading yellow, their leaf tears forming sunny arrows in the flow, nuts falling in the glide, bringing smoker memories of hams cooked under their roast, red maples tapped for their syrup, the unharvested loblolly pines dropping their branches…
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Rain Dance
The rain creates its own ballet starting with a lone figure on a bridge holding an umbrella in the fog splashing teardrops with his feet, doing jetes over the larger puddles, until the wind inverts his shade, plies turning to pirouettes, approaches cascading to the portal and the head of the street, dancing to a…
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The Mayas of the Old Beehive
The Mayas of Colemnar Viejo for the last twilight hours of early May exist in mature thoughts, statues unable to address the questions designed to unseat their repose from spectators marching into shadows. By night they will know the answers that will secret their lives, grateful for Ermita de Remedios for the revelation and…
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The Walnut Street Bridge Hides Its Sorrows
The Walnut Street pedestrian bridge hides it sorrows in bevies of Instagram brides, cheerleaders, band members wearing their school ts , leashed dogs sniffing the edges of Statue of Liberty green wanting to dive after the slowly moving boats on the Tennessee river below, couples holding hands, wisely staying to the middle away from the…
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The Loneliness of Moving Spaces
To ride the subway clutching half dead roses in a paper bag is to know that shadows have weight, light has gravity and geometry exists in algorithms of pain, that sadness is a reflection of the loneliness of space and time. Even the sisters under the MTA map, one cradled in uneasy sleep in…
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Shadows and Footprints of Everyday Crimes
The shadows of our footprints follow us everywhere from the court, the pavement, the dance, the street, ink stained register of our birth, and the stumble to grave, invisible to us unless in melting snow, bed of dirt. The powder on the factory floor leaves the forensics of our existence. Watch as trees…
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The Sea Grape Remembers
It has been five years since I visited you my old Sea Grape friend, standing proud and wizened in the front yard, unbothered by all the construction behind. Everything is smaller and crowded than I once lived it, except for you— still the right size for a wild girl to climb, providing enough shade for…
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The Plains Weavers
The weavers of the plains are tireless workers poor but honest, always trusting the generosity of an unlocked door to let in a husband working nights at the print and design shop, finishing that last small sign full of eclairs glazed with the most deliciously appealing serif font for the new French bakery off of…
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Passion’s Cursive Highway
P It starts with the line, an upwards curlicue, the noose flapping rightwards in the wind, at the top of the curl, an afterthought, because every line needs a curve and a loop to follow the road set to the next ones beginning, less it turn in on itself, circle about, or start and end…
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The Forgetting
a black cowl is over her deliberately shuttered in an unlit windowless room so when I open my eyes she is invisible, a lemon whiff peeling away, a piano c note on a whole beat struck three times, to tingle skin, ping the tuning ear, enough to know-now-ow-w the first great rain of her, the…
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The Poppy Influencers in Flanders Fields
In Elsinore the poppies grow Despite the constant selfies show That stake their place in yellow high, No birds photo bomb their big I Show not seen by same throngs below. We are the influencers you know. We shine, svelte pose, for good ad flow, Post for your…
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The Orangutang Falls
The Sumatran orangutan, gardening her spot comfortable in the canopy and lush tree top, nursing her young month-old, fell fiery below, seventy-four holes in her when the shooting stopped. – Four air gun pellets pierced her left eye, two her right, leaving her darkly blind, a howling Homer, Milton in orange pain, bereaved, childless, now…
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Border Crossing
There is no sky or earth in the white van that crosses me over, nor in the drywall coop painted red where white men with tattooed arms stood up and sit down, up and down, unleashed erections pivoting and searching for the best angle to penetrate my forever painful ass. – I am called “pollo”,…
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Grief Is Everything and All
My grief is stillborn, not consoled by the hope of replacement of another good little boy or girl with brown paws and a gentle lick, another Anne or Tom with eyes that cry of heaven and a bright mind that can write lines of cerulean clarity or calculate pi to the twentieth decimal, a wife…
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The 67th, 68th, 69th Blow
He could only understand her with his blows, grabbing her by the throat strangling the last words out of her, hitting her on the top of her head trying to knock any idea of her making him a better man, like his father tried 136 times before. – Yes, he remembered every blow he received…
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Black in Japan
Being black in Japan means you have more white spaces on the day-night trains. – The darkness of U.S. allows yellow jaundice to shine its rising sun. – Empty seats allow black thoughts to make room for small breezes of knowledge. – That Ainu minstrels shouldn’t be doing Doo-Wop on Nippon TV. – That the…
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Red Cup Youths Know No History
In a well educated town, in a highly educated school they thought nothing of red cups turned swastika for that perfect Instagram shot. – A Nazi salute, a hearty “Heil Hitler” made it a meme that only needed little fingers under noses to stick it in the dah viewers face. – They knew the joke…
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Black as Pepto Bismol
When you’re young, desperate for fame and black you’ll play diarrhea in a Pepto Bismol commercial. Don’t do that black face, boy. – When you have Michael Jackson fame You’ll fly in a plane filled with little boys and toys. Don’t do that black face, nigga. – When you’re rich and black living the R.…
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Migrant Daughter
The picker’s daughter will not meet her husband on a tobacco farm, will not have her hands stained yellow from the recycling rain and sun, nor will serrated leaves scar her mixing nicotine into blood and bone. – She will pick and bail knowledge. She will listen and not marry seasons after her first spotting,…
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Ode to Stacey Abrams, Star Trek Politician
It’s the Trek and not the Star that keeps her moving. She is a Voyager suspended in the temporal rift of campaigning. – Inside she is Spock. Politics makes her Kirk. On committees she is all Janeway. – The world sees her as Lahura, the com officer trying to interpret and relay messages back and…
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Excavation of a Young T. Rex
The king dies with the child when the fearsome T. Rex becomes a cultivated chicken, a plush to hold when boy and family dog cower from lightning and thunder and the blows of life. – Beyond the fear is science, the dive into bones, dusty history, to determine whether this fossilized thigh was mommy’s and…
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South Beach Daze
South Beach before the hurricane was an old man in oversize shorts that dangled below his knees and protruded an obscene wangle when he walked. – A Brooklyn or Queens refugee with a scent of ovens baked in. He smelled of bagels after breakfast, Wolfie’s cheese cake in the afternoon, cholent for an observant dinner…
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Fairhope: A Poet’s Dream
Born of progress and poverty they took root in the pines along Mobile Bay shedding a beneficent light to all the world, knowing they might have a fair hope of succeeding. – They owned the land, they shared the land and everyone paid a single tax. – The poets came first, slides, tourists and Shakespeareans…
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Wildfires: California, Paradise
Nature always wanted to burn Paradise down, a swailing to its Indian, Spanish calling, a burn-off to its mandrake roots, enflamed with its third day existence, stuck between the iteration of water and light, heaven and earth, day and night, the animal hordes, the existence before the existence of man for which it sacrificed dust…
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The Parisian Chimney Sweep Knows the Night
1. They are ash. They are soot . They are silhouettes against the Paris sky. – The chimney sweeps of Paris dirty themselves into a clean extinction. – Coal, fire and wood are easy to digitalize in a fireplace generating no warmth, embers and smoke that blackens brick. 2. Jean fell off the roof and…
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The Love Stories and Tragedies of Trash
Swept up in the last row of the balcony of an old movie palace with crushed red velvet chairs: • one crumbled ticket for Gone in 60 Seconds, • a golden tub with unspoken kernels and a hole big enough for the popcorn trick, • three invisible blonde hairs from a future wife. – Thrown…
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Sharma Climbs the Stairs
The tiniest dog Won’t climb the tallest of steps Without big courage.
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Why I Hate Facebook Potato Salad Polls
Why have this poll if your husband is never going to eat your damn potato salad! I hate cheese-s cake but I adore yours. Make me this damn potato salad so I can love you even more!
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Epitaph to a Stone
Every thing has a history: a beginning and a death, everything in between is a memory, not life, just a record of its existence, an acknowledgement of its being there until it is there and there and there and way over there. – A stone is a stone until light kisses it and it becomes…
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Nun Sense
Sister Dorothea would whack my knuckles with the flat edge of a desk ruler trying to knock some nun sense into me every five times I messed up on fractions. She had that well lived-in roundness the faithful get after hard years of serving Christ in the smallest crosses of existence. From the back she…
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the rapist god
How does the world forgive a rapist god? By creating many more murdering ones until there is just one murderer proclaiming himself King of the Universe. An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind, Gandhi said, creating an offense to severed eyes, ears, tongues, limbs, the impaled world. Numbers move…
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Film Course 101
Film is fluid, ink, light, meter an illusion of light that completes the rhyme, a gleaming that is one right word away from the essential one, that one weak word that shows up at the top of the auto-rank, a repetition, variation, at 24 frames per second, two dozen light words away from the right…
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Death Is Like No Movie I Have Ever Seen: The Trailers
At the Miracle my young brother saw death for the first time in a shark called Bruce, Jaws swallowing the onscreen boy on the raft in a chum wave that rippled from the light, a death that drenched every body in the shock of a nature devouring everything it sees; in an illusion real enough…
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She rise
He didn’t want her to go into triteness until he get to the other side of her memory floating away like a balloon, an ordinary thing, an ordinary word, in a world full of the weight of ordinary things. – She was floating away word by word, a balloon on a string with a heart…
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An Elegy and a Kaddish for Parkland: Activism of Blood and Parkland Sighs Seven Times
Elegy: Activism of Blood They never expected to be claimed in the activism of blood, the March for Lives, the tour across the country filling in for the senior trip for some; the pledge of voter registration for others, replacing the animal house of SATs, admission essays regulated to vague because the personal is too…
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Core Curriculum
The core curriculum downplays music, the arts, how to read and feel a poem, stresses STEM and how to zigzag to avoid a bullet, basic life survival skills. – Wouldn’t it better be for them to experience an Ode to Joy, the Magic Flute, know they share the same darkness in Hamlet’s heart, and the…
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Napalm Girl
Little did they know little Napalm Girl that while your skin seared and your cry became the shriek of war that in fiery, fiery Dresden would you find your finest burst after 50 years of dropping peace bombs. – The genuine scream of a child will change the world. – Note: A poem based on…
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Gynandromorph
The gynandromorph exists in its own perfection in the middle of the branch, the center of all birdsong— two parted whistles ending in a slow trill; the right mixing of cardinal ZZ and ZW, brother and sister; enough inheritance to be rightly hued, but not enough to be brightly sung and thus forever mute. –…
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The Love Candle
They both saw the ad for the new Valentine candle. She imagined it smelled of rose petals and chocolate. He knew it would stink of pussy and cock. True love, we all have a fragrance for that.
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Sometimes Love Can Stand No Other: The Love Story of Asim and Melati
She was everybody’s hope. He was his own. – He had been caged for 224 years, a fearsome symmetrical number, 71 free to roam the mirror forest night canopy, a tyger yearning to be a true tiger and not a Tigger, a lonely pacing streak of orange and black hungering to be proudly the last…
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I am deaf and not your simile
I am deaf not deaf, not small d death as some people like to say, but little d as in leaf, as in small l life, even though, you have to drop the l and add the d, for all of us to get and end there, although neither is usually capitalized unless it refers…
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Bloody Disgusting, Absolutely Horrifying
Every death is disgusting. Every death is not horrifying. – The odor of death makes everyone turn away and is thus disgusting to the core. – The important deaths turn the body back to the fatal beauty, the deadly stillness, – that was once the most important human thing of their life, – their death…