POETRY

“Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.”
—Rita Dove
A Beautiful Thing

I want to roll in this moment until I become its vocabulary
until I smell like the bones
until I am its echo…

Unerased | Steep Steps

My grandmother asked, “Does it feel like being widowed?”

First

Long after midnight, we’re talking about our first time

Electric Eels, Finishing School, Teeth

Millions of Americans have been affected by identity theft. It’s probably the greenhouse gases.

Aging Punks

Every so often, they add a tattoo
in honor of some long-forgotten love.

beach
On Undressing a Color / On Undressing a Girl

I imagine that undressing a color, though, would be so much like peeling a memory away from the grey and the white matter of your brain.

Dis Place Ment

People have always coped with flooding, and they learned to cope with death.

Despairathon

You’ve spent a lifetime training
for this.

Getting Postcards From a Piano Showroom

The two of us toast to a man we both love, to whatever degree, clink our glasses and laugh…

i do not want to wait until it’s too late

the strands of your hair on the bathroom tiles aren’t sketching defeat. that’s you spitting disease in the face with another day you’ve woken up to.

Clotheslines

Ma wrings
a wet world
of colors

3:17 AM as Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks

Part of being a good sad person
is always painting the shadows
in the right direction and knowing
what sorrow to art with.

Pit Stop in Kansas

we drove on through
the blue seal of morning as the turbines
turned and winked out their hearts

oh Manifesto

The collective
failure
of ethical standards

Vase

The storm passes without snow.
The car waits loyally in the back lot.

Me and Other Bodily Accessories

I am not a guide
for every traveler
of loss.

Like dirt

this is what I want you to to see:
leaves falling because it is too late for them not to

There is an alternative universe

Ghosts for hire, whispers in her mouth,
cysts to feel, the symmetry of a gift.

Time Travel

I count my homes—
those of my scattered youth
the sanctuary of our young family
the intermittent rest stops
of apartments and vacations.