Betula papyrifera
(paper birch)
a field of Betty Davis,
form letters falling from your pockets
shifting undetected from
reservoir to doctor’s lawn.
whenever the sun and moon
stretch their cans on wires, caught
on stars
stretching taut
still reaching,
their gossip tinny and dissolving
in the roar of summer sprinklers
and their arcs of water
spinning spitting spinning
malus
(apple)
for every minute
beneath blossomed shade:
a grass-stained shin, hip,
a blade of it stitched furious
on head among the gray.
My old roommate Jess and I used to listen to a recording of T.S. Eliot reading “The Wasteland.” We liked to repeat his lines, trying to emulate his cadence and slightly creepy inflection, particularly the line, “April is the cruelest month.” I think of that memory now, as March shoves its own door shut and […]
every day she lays out the clothes and poison,
then she checks on gretal rising in the oven.
Sometimes I feel conflicted when it comes to this space and sharing. I’ve been journaling online since 1999(journaling longhand since gosh knows when, but I’ve never been extremely consistent). Plus the act of writing new poems can be a bit of life dictation. I’ve gone through moments of considerable self-exposure as well as moments of […]
Georgia. Billboards and red clay, fruit stands. Hotel soaps so slight in their geometrics they became phases of the moon before the shower ended. Hallway carpet I will never see again, hum of ice machine.
Virginia. We dug a big hole in the sand. So big that the children of strangers started appearing with shovels and […]
epilogue of the bear trap
I sleep in a square. I bookend my profiles with pillows and I keep two below my head. Waking means lifting and climbing’ sleeping means sinking. I dream surrounded.
In the back of the house, rotting limes. They liquefy. Porous green to a brown gray mass, happy dents.
Tell me what surviving […]
Successful hand transplants. Do the veins and nerves ask each other to dance? Do they tangle like tree roots, fire their guns into the other’s shins & lapse into tango for life?
My coat attracts snow flakes, stellar dendrites on my shoulders and sectored plates up the nose and on the lips as I walk […]
Your face,
a dagger smacking
back moonlight.
Grin made of molasses
spreading out the center.
It is here,
tucked in the lesser referenced corners
of rotating clock,
where every suspended disbelief drops,
lunar light finding your crooked tooth
to sparkle like diamond,
to render all crickets silent and blinded,
to disorient blades of grass left bent
in the imprint of your body.
Never you mind, paper plate sun,
yolk below […]