POETRY

“Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.”
—Rita Dove
Fallout Shelter

I imagined a cascade of slow death for all / that mattered…

REVENGE SCENE

Okay, picture this: We’re in an elevator. The elevator shuts down. It doesn’t matter where we’re going, only that we’re alone.

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.

Hollywood Hills
the remarkable thing

I am still waiting for the lion

Finding My Fix

I slumped in front of a massive desk, a passive patient corroded with failure and dread.

Like dirt

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

Unerased | Steep Steps

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

Ode To the Dove Pt. VI (Avrom Sutzkever)

Yes I am guilty, I’m guilty. A sin was desirable then.
Bring the dancer back to the stalks.

Willpower

Live the rest of your life
from one worst case to another.

Going Broke

Winter sat like a wolf
on the horizon.

melting ice cap
blue is the color of surrender

you know that
baby swallows make silver ripples
in wild rivers to court reeds?

things they won’t tell you but should:

love is a soggy tea stain on a grocery receipt

Lavandula

Listen to me: I know
the winter gloom in
mid-summer…

Vase

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

On the Night Row-Houses Across the Street Catch Fire

You let the yellow glow
from eye sockets. The building up the street
is burning faster and faster.

Mom, in Her Dementia, Steals Oranges

and apples, mackintosh mostly, but any kind left in The Pub
at the Assisted Living Place

Condolences

my friends’ fathers are
dropping
I mean dying
like flies

The love of my life moved from portland to new england

He has stories that I am not in
anymore. It’s healed this way.

Electric Eels, Finishing School, Teeth

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

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…