Calliope Teaches Me How to Write
It’s dusk, and these hallowed groundsare motionless and silentOrange radiates from the horizon,and the oak trees loom like shadowsof...
Joan, Bob, and Ginsberg
If you had known Joan and Bob
you would have said they were such crazies -
her hauntingly beautiful voice
his wildly cataclysmic fantasies...
Little Creatures
The teacher who looked ancientto her circle of first gradersleaned forward and explained
that the typical lightning bugwas simply the twinklein an angel’s eye,...
Inner Compass
Golden shovel from David Whyte’s poem “Sweet Darkness”“…anyone or anything that does not bring you alive it too small for you.”
It could rain...
DetoxIn the morning her long hair drapes like black tears over her shoulders,her Hispanic bones bruised with alcohol and sorrowso that when she says...
Middle Path, Kenyon College
I didn’t know which ones werenasturtiums until after the warmSeptember afternoon I spottedtheir round leaves with orange and yellowflowers on the...
Which is to say, I miss you
Today everyone looks familiarunder the yellow ocher, autumn light.
This woman with the child.That older man resting on a...
Winter Dream
Time ravishes the line, with glare of colorYou fashion a sky, scarring silenceMoon hoards the light
Scars of strangeLines fashioned into a druma sky...
Loop
Goddamn those whippoorwills, we wanted
to shoot them, our history teacher said.
-
He’d lived in the woodsiest neck of our district
since childhood. Of course we’d heard them
-
too: In...
Tondo: Closing the CircleAfter Sam Gilliam’s Something is Going On!—2021
In a muddle of abstractiona face emerges—owl, cat, human—no certainty.Should I turn the canvas,straighten its...
The Reflection Terrace at Brookside Gardens
I am still water
I take on the color of thehedge-pine greens thegeese-moss browns thetortoise-rock grays theazalea-breeze pinks thebride-haze whites...
