POETRY

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

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

appetites

you quit wearing pants
loaf around your yard
in hole-nipped panties

Soft Porn and Cuban Pine

It recommended
soft porn, as gentle prodding and petting parent
to parent might calm and soothe the kid.

Pit Stop in Kansas

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

A Way of Seeing

Just starlight and some small scribbling across vinyl.

Dear Deer in the Compost Pile

I tap at the alphabet while a single deer
taps at the dirt beyond the brush
on the far side of the tree line.

Condolences

my friends’ fathers are
dropping
I mean dying
like flies

melting ice cap
blue is the color of surrender

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

Good Driver

Lights on the dashboard spell out
“You still can’t kiss me”

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.

Despairathon

You’ve spent a lifetime training
for this.

Like dirt

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

robertson quay

how does an afternoon turn
on its axis?

Several someones

a folksome, gruesome opera
of gauze and malcontent.

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…

Vase

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

Hollywood Hills
the remarkable thing

I am still waiting for the lion

Back Suplex

Gravel-scatted hell &
we were blessed to be able
to hold on for even a heartbeat

My Multiverses

It is the 70s. 1970s? 2570s? Who knows?
Audre and I have a penthouse in New York.