POETRY

“Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.”
—Rita Dove
Pit Stop in Kansas

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

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…

“Artifact,” as Translated from Gluberhöff’s Lexicon

Any still figure at mid-late evening, when the long shadows make even crumbs appear arranged like furniture.

Babylon

If America is Babylon / and you are an exile / newly arrived among pagans / Catholic, ‘Ngolan, Black, woman / you already know how to pray

Snow Falls from Branches

Should have found a job by now; should have slept in the night;
should have boiled old coffee before noon.

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.

The River

I myself should never have been born

Drowning in sky

I have observed, the theorist
I am

There is an alternative universe

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

necromancer woman, witch woman

In my universe, my arm carries a heart and flowers,
my back a misguided quote

Willpower

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

if detritus is all i’m made up of

my love is a glass shard, a knife made of madness and moonlight,
and there are already way too many fragments in this house

I could, even now, go down to the water

Even from this distance I could go out
the door it would bang shut and crumble

Like dirt

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

An Endeavor of Being Now

We stop doing dishes while
a mile unwinds
from the tree outside.

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.

You can’t make them love you, no matter how artfully you betray yourself

Try not to see your own predicament in every fucking thing.

Mom, in Her Dementia, Steals Oranges

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

Fallout Shelter

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