POETRY

“Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.”
—Rita Dove
Finding My Fix

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

Drowning in sky

I have observed, the theorist
I am

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

Mom, in Her Dementia, Steals Oranges

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

First

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

heavy rain
The Plot

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

woman at bar
After She Told Me You Pushed Her Down the Stairs

Empty vessels
make the most sound, I think,
as you rip the fairy lights off the handrail.

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.

Aging Punks

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

Landscape with Ash

You are strange, my mother said, dwelling on the past.

Me and Other Bodily Accessories

I am not a guide
for every traveler
of loss.

painting of apple and grapes
Feast Of

anger, like you can sink teeth into, candy apple

Black Ghosts of Ponderosa on a Silhouette of Hill

Even as the sun warms the concrete
the long nights’ sensual cold lingers in my clothes.

Observer of the Patient

Her brown eyes,
how a fig
considers itself.

[Zoetrope with Particulates in it and a Newborn]

and then her eyes fully opened — blazed through with strands of mud

Lobster

I suffer visions and many indignities
while looking for the Lobster

Babylon

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

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…