Poetry |
“What I Like,” “Elegy” & “The Second Year”
“An elegy reveals the current / state of the grief. Therefore, // I cannot write an elegy. / Grief is a shape-shifter.”
Poetry |
“The Pitfalls of Enlightenment,” “Imagining His Final Hours or Just Like a Dream, You’re Here With Me” & “Go On”
“It is a rite of passage / to learn the game, to take your seat / and study your partner across // the folding table. Inheritance / of how to lose, how to sneak a win.”
Poetry |
“Sarah & Lila”
“In the cemetery, look for the husband’s name. / I finally find you, Lila — stone letters / freshly carved, marble bench facing a pond for / serenity.”
Poetry |
“Carried Onward to Our End”
“But there is no resolution to unknowing, pain; / There is the pale smoke that drifts above the charnel ground. / Shadow men and women bring corpses of their forbears, / bring firewood. Light flames. Tend fires …”
Poetry |
“I Consider My Hands After a Friend Calls Them Lovely” & “Abecedarian for Sainthood”
“Amelia, the young girl I clean houses with, / bites her nails down to the skin, / comes to work on a bus from rehab. / Dusts around orange pill bottles she didn’t / expect to see there, pale moons calling out to her / from inside their powdered wells.”
Poetry |
“Fitting the Profile” & “Traffic Report”
“The peculiar smell in the back / of a cop car is not old cum or stale perfume. / It’s Fear 101 or Advanced Fear, or both. / How many hands against how many / cars, how many cuffed, how many heads / shoved down into that seat?”
Poetry |
“Concrete Pastoral”
“… a Target parking lot’s grey order punctured / by the aquiline nose of an unhoused man / late in his seventies, belted neat in khakis, pulling // a carry-on …”
Poetry |
“Calle del Desengaño, Antigua, Guatamala”
“Someone is burning chaff, / someone is burning garbage, someone / is singing to a radio ranchera. / Animals are crying in a far corral // as they do before an earthquake.”
Poetry |
“River Bride”
“There’s a continent inside our bodies / built from the attar of Eve, a small boat in the river / of our veins & a burned-out church at the fourth fold // in the wrist.”
Poetry |
“Ode on a Field in Norwich, Vermont”
“We have staked out this grass to save us / from certain death. We crush / our crime-scene-outline backs against it weightfully.”
Poetry |
“Purchase” & “Dragonfly”
“The panties arrived by mail, // flat and overlapping on blue / cardboard like four open-winged birds // on a rectangle of sky.”
Poetry |
“Story Time in Shestakove” & “For the Poets”
“Small groups of children gather / in the colors / of song and tattered flags.”
Poetry |
“Christmas Songs”
“The swimming pool lies under its moldy, canvas top. / Faded poinsettia leaves, brown over white, / struggle into a February that sees / roses bend their necked stems in silent death throes.”
Poetry |
“The God of Love Never Says It’s Complicated“
“Is that where your boyfriend’s body bounced // from the car into a patch of bushes? / You say, I wasn’t even drunk, but blinded, // stated mildly, matter of fact and of record.”
Poetry |
“At Gramma’s House” & “On East 38th Street”
“Peek outside the door to the backyard, / there’s a quad of dead shrubs, cat skeletons, / and nopal cacti a father trims for nopales. / Dead children become sediment, a red moon / hovers over a river.”