poetry

  Brother, do you remember                the splinters, the shape of that conversation? The words                the bent metal made? How I told you If you can’t sit still, I’ll do the … Read More

  I am two people at dusk, two bodies wrapped in thin cotton Among the crabgrass on some night in August when the narrow Alley light of the full moon shakes across the Atlantic, buoys Waving from the sidelines. In … Read More

  Here lie the femurs, drowned swimmers’ bones raised with cranes to analyze back on land under lights more clinical than this one, bleaching me, day after day, with loggerhead patterns. Here lies the spine, unacknowledged guide of the body, … Read More

  It is rare for a person to enter a castle, but common for him to die there. Often enough I feed the wrong meter. One bird will raise another’s and think nothing. I raise my head and am astonished … Read More

  Would you believe my red if I exposed the green underneath? Would you carefully cry into my figure and mourn the wet shoulder in your wake? Don’t bother— this is. Would you believe me if I told you this … Read More

  Tell me the distance between here and home is not remorse or an old loss rousing out of sleep. Tell me memories are not attached to time. Tell me they are simply feathers falling, blue and bright and moving. … Read More

  Remember October, the one pressed in your bible & that red whipping wind over the pier. Remember the heavy light   of a bright dying, the compass, a magic you could not find, the endlessness of never knowing whether … Read More

  To conjure love from bitterness, To plant the mint and watch it thrive, From anger capture anger’s fright, Whisk pity into empathy, To walk the dogs in fields at night Under a starry symphony, In morning wake and rise … Read More

  Down in the cellar there’s a household god. He is drinking up the planet. He has little eyes in his belly, Which are his thoughts, Evidence that he may be thinking. They’re blinking. One, then another. Sometimes two at … Read More

  Last night a storm gleaned the last leaves from trees in our courtyard, made a chartreuse cemetery on mulch, exposing ribs of houses once hidden behind profuse canopies. Like a man wanting a child, alone on his couch watching … Read More

  In the U-Haul leaving Chicago, we traverse the tall scaffold of the Indiana Skyway. I reach out the window for something concrete, pull back my hand to find candle flames flickering, crushed moths. I’m motherless now & daughterless yet. … Read More

  Snakes in the tall grass, sprinklers ticking the first time he forced my head underwater.   I counted seconds in the blue, planetary flecks on the concrete wall underwater.   He pulled me up, then the game repeated itself. … Read More