Poetry |
“Phantom State” & “About the Pen”
“My brother is bent / over a computer 204 miles away. / Rootlessness is not so much a betrayal / as it is a logical extension, my father / shouts. Of what? I ask. I can’t hear his / answer.”
Poetry |
“Provenance,” “Fugue” & “Fin du Monde”
“Theirs, a brief effusion, brief as these words: / experience, memory, perception, exchanged / for chronic interconnectedness, surveillance, / former democratic rule turned demagoguery.”
Poetry |
“The Gulls (The Eagle)”
“There was a choice I had to make and I made it. And sometimes I think the // voice in my head tells me I didn’t make it. That everyone else made the choice, and I floated / instead like a gull over the surface of its water …”
Poetry |
“Remainders”
“When my mother died / twenty-seven years / of appointment books / sat in her closet, / each errand noted / and checked off once done …”
Poetry |
“The Nine Children of Mariana Gluza”
“what does it mean if your family / erases you as a child was the grief of your death / too much to bear or were you replaceable”
Poetry |
“Go On, Then,” “Fire” & “Vanishing Points”
“One of these days, Alice! / roared from the screen on weekend poker nights / while Connor or Cooney or Burke was riffling the cards. / In pajamas, we slid our faces through the staircase bars.”
Poetry |
“Notes on Recovery”
“I lowered her into her chair / and she kissed my hands again // and again, lips like paper / drinking the last of our story.”
Poetry |
“Little Mirror”
“… then a fish swimming close / to the image of something familiar, // but from another world, this molten / phenomenon, which might be wreckage // from a lighthouse keeper’s mantle …”
Poetry |
“How I Became a Bird” & “Cabbage Soup”
“My father kept a Rosary in his pocket. / He was known for giving away inexpensive / holy medals and pocket prayer beads. / At one point he handed out gold-colored / lapel pin doves.”
Poetry |
“Saturn Return” & “Fragment Found in a Ballot Box”
“… The stark order of sex / disagrees with me. I like to stay home / and make up mysteries, like we did that winter / the rain kept changing to snow and back again.”
Poetry |
“The Theory of the Multiverse”
“I live uptown I live / downtown I live all around / say goodbye to the mythopoeic / no more receiving holy orders / just remember to pay attention”
Poetry |
“A Way to Restore Beauty to the Universe” & “A Garden, Post-Catastrophe”
“… we spoke to a copper sundial to call on womankind, / our sisters in the desert, our mothers on the coast / evoking laughter not yet forgotten in a season of grief –”
Poetry |
“What’s The Past Like?”
“But / now I recall the sound a gray bird // made to wake me from a crazed dream. / Like a scratch awl with its fluted wooden // handle chipping bark off an oak tree.”
Poetry |
“Autobiography of Melancholy” & “Silence”
“All day I was drugged with sadness. / Asleep, my fists curled like thoughts unspoken. // I am a realist bothered by reality. / Someone who dreams with eyes wide open.”
Poetry |
“Eternal Summer”
“Split a penny in half and use it twice / he jokes, gesturing at $6.99 / neon laundry detergent jugs, dented. / I couldn’t afford these back then.“