Poetry |
“Strangers in Our Own Earth”
“We have been made into something other: / something ancient, swallowed —// badland curves set from the once of subtropics, / maybe single-celled algae and zooplankton.”
Poetry |
“Circe in the Age of Instagram”
“Nothing is anachronism / if you live forever, it says // in my bio. I started with / carefully composed shots // of the island, sun filtered / through olive grove and arbor …”
Poetry |
“The Kite” & “The Unlikeliness of Empty Spaces”
“This is what it means to be in the now; / release a kite to the wind, / feel the tug of a string, / his small face turns up, / all fascination to the sky.”
Poetry |
“Legacy of Blue,” “Incarnations,” “Incarnation Intercept Sonnet,” “Riven, Driven Back” & “Jacob’s Ladder”
“But to keep vision / intact, I stand back, / asking nothing of it / but the sun’s stance / on the diurnal, / incarnation’s probe / of recurrence, / that fire I walk through.”
Poetry |
“A Reading from the Epistle of Horace the Paralytic at Corinth”
“Thus, our Lord / spoke even me, Horace Parlan — // Horace the Paralytic — / into historical bones.”
Poetry |
“The Garden State”
“I keep an artificial hydrangea in my vase, / its pale blue shot-through with khaki. // In Jersey, we called them snowballs, / so much fuller than roses, so weirdly azure …”
Poetry |
“Half the Hour” & “Measure”
“For a poem ‘Close Is Far and Figured’ I plotted stanzas and rhythm / simply to fulfill the title // “Close is far” back then was a sad young man on the crowded F train / his thumb slowly swiping texted photos of his mother …”
Poetry |
“Broken Coffee Break”
“I stroll up to my favorite out-of-town coffee shop/ and find it closed for good. Through the black glass,/ a naked counter, stools scattered, space thrown open / to conjecture and rats, stillness, indifference.”
Poetry |
“The ‘Gfit'”
“… it was early in the pandemic,/ even though I thought maybe it was getting / towards the end of the pandemic, / and I didn’t have cancer, or if I did, / I didn’t know I had cancer …”
Poetry |
“My Mother” and “Malcah”
“I strained to serve as her first son. // She sang songs from WWI with her father that she sang / again, but who would listen? Not I, clearly her worst son.”
Poetry |
“The White Hare”
“You saw it first in a dream: / the white hare bounding over / tufted knolls, the sun arcing / toward sable twilight”
Poetry |
“Thank Plankton”
“Well, they are gone, and here it comes, / the August sun, with the momentum of a rolling boil, / to blanch the greens and blues from leaves of grass / and trees and lighten boughs / by grafting absence where sap has stopped.”
Poetry |
“Negentropy”
“Is light / more like the waves sloshing ashore, or // the shore itself, all seven quintillion grains, / give or take?”
Poetry |
“Comedy (iii),” “Preparation of the Dead Girl or Preparation of the Bride” & “Roxies in Savasana”
“As far as Courbet’s knowing could carry him, the girl was dead. She was dead & then made marriageable, badly resurrected by an agent, white dress layered over her naked body.”
Poetry |
“A Few Wars”
“They’re reaching out to us with their guns. / They must want to make a difference // to someone — it’s us they hail now …”