POETRY

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

A Way of Seeing

Just starlight and some small scribbling across vinyl.

Dis Place Ment

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

The River

I myself should never have been born

Going Broke

Winter sat like a wolf
on the horizon.

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.

love poem with dead leaves & color

I would always rather be happy than
dignified. Rather held than held
in awe.

Electric Eels, Finishing School, Teeth

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

melting ice cap
blue is the color of surrender

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

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.

Pit Stop in Kansas

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

painting of apple and grapes
Feast Of

anger, like you can sink teeth into, candy apple

Babylon

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

Mom, in Her Dementia, Steals Oranges

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

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…

The Kotel in Jerusalem is Filled with Cracks

We found in his suitcase T-shirts, his siddur, gifts he bought for his grandchildren…

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…

There is an alternative universe

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

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.