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Three Poems
If we are lucky, we get old / and sit a while in God’s waiting room, / dance at cafes, admire / Baroque architecture, embody
the environment.
Two Poems
Alas for the prisoners of masculinity / who would not be caught dead holding / a man’s hand on the boardwalk between / South Pointe Drive and First Street, / where even hetero couples get swept / out to sea, crushed under condos or / washed up on the beach to be eaten / by realtors. What do you want, nothing / is perfect. (But it might be survivable.)
Lazy Aging
Seemed a ponderous passing of days / since meadows waved flaxen arms, / and a silver brook backed up / to form a beaver pond.
Three Poems
A decade ago, I would have told you I'd have children by now. It was never a question, only an inevitability. I longed for love and marriage, for stability, for vows and promises. Motherhood would have been the happy byproduct of my dreams come true. I would have gladly consigned myself to that fate had my future manifested in the ways I desired it to. But wanting a thing only drove it further from my grasp.
If asked, then lie
For six years I kept you safe from it all; / sharp countertops. The toxic lake algae. The toxic grass. / I shut all the windows so the toxic air wouldn’t get in. / I checked your fever with a thin thermometer. / I uncanned soup and paced the linoleum.
I told you to be silent in the attic.
Great American Desert
There is no water but only sandy, calcareous soil, / and no trees to fell for a lean to, or to hang a noose. … / “Come. Trust me. In my violence is freedom.”
Dobbs v. Jackson Tasting Menu
the pamplemousse / has finished rotting / everyone’s sky / under my french nails
Two Poems from “My Sponsor Told Me to Break Plates”
Either I will fall asleep or I will not. / If I fall asleep either I will dream vividly or I will not.
Flesh and Bone Zuihitsu
They think it’s been months since my mom tried to contact me. / The cousins say she’s reaching out to connect. I say it’s been years / of you are such a bitch and this whole family is done with you.
Like Qafia to Radif
my lover’s eyes sing patterns of rhyme, but for me it’s those lips. / Fleshy enjambment where I end–stop, the perfect couplet, those lips.
Dish With Bamboo Leaves
So I am trying to make sense of / this world; why my mother throws out / anything that shows any sign of / chipping; why she / insists on buying porcelain, or / keep the jagged / blue-glazed pieces of hollowed clay.
Three Translations from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Book of Hours
I often pray at night: be mute, / who remains washing in gestures, / and whom the spirit drives in dreams, / that he writes the heavy sum of silence / on foreheads and mountains.
Birth of the Blues
Were the blues born on sultry evenings under canopies of stars? / Come into this world between dark southern thighs / while our enslaved ancestors dance to strumming banjos, wailing mouth harps, / and ancient rhythms of violins, tambourines, and drums?
I’m in a good mood
I’m in a good mood / for being spiteful. Tacos: / tongue and head-meat. I want / to feel a little cannibalistic / though not.
Two Poems from “What the Hollow Held”
People said "Sorry for your loss," suggesting / gone forever, suggesting never come back, / never get found, as in empty, as in without, / but it was something more / like transformation