We danced to the Pandeiro
Struck, shaken palms
thumbed words in metal
places we could not fit into
In Rio how the wind would drape
whatever we were hiding,
blonde wind strangling the
açaí palms, cavaquinho in hand,
your rabbit cheek strummed,
wonderland don’t worry
about whatever worries you,
whisper this dream with me
in syncopated beats
until we get it right
(originally published in Revolution John)
I showed you how pawns function
on a glass chessboard
they sacrifice themselves to protect who they love
and what rooks and knights risk
in the modern age
there is a hierarchy in how to approach things
cigarette smoke permeated the wooden air
a phonograph streamed Brahms
I could never quite understand complexity
we sat on couch crumbs with our jeans touching
your friend gave me a rare Bahamian seashell
mottled with beige and caramel
I could not hear the ocean
no matter how hard it pressed against my ear
but with my head against your chest
I remember the beating tide
back then I was composed of sand
scooped whole by strangers hands
learning the gravity of myself
before dissipating
one day
I will build you a castle
(originally published in Walking is Still Honest, Summer 2016)
entered a contest
a kid gets shot on the street
there is no winning
(originally published in 50 Haiku, Spring 2016)
A river isn’t really blue. The Mississippi
has dried, and even love is transparent.
We adorn ourselves blue so loss
can be quantified in color. Such
is the brittle paintbrush, naked
and grieving, but we are not
the color of grieving,
nor tobacco spat in the dugout
in shame. We remember
the dirt, and who we loved,
long before we searched
clouds’ faces for ghosts,
her grays in the white
within eternal blue.
(originally published in ‘the vacant hinge of a song’, courtesy of Origami Poems Project)
The cicadas come at night, after you
fall soundly in the trance of your booklight,
buzzing pages. Forget, there’s no undo.
The cicadas come at night,
arriving several years apart despite
love’s hindwings clung to bark whose heart is true.
We burrow in those pages craving sight
and air and words– we gather in droves to
kiss your hand though you think it is a bite.
We wait years and always return to you.
The cicadas come at night.
(originally published in The Road Not Taken, Summer 2016)
I listened, during that foggy morning stroll
on the Golden Gate, when you alluded
to what it must mean to jump,
how it must feel to fall.
The foghorn blared every five minutes
from some ship we could not find beneath us.
We peered our heads over the low railing
and inhaled the gray.
Red telephones rang in our heads.
I can still hear the ringing
from the hotel’s broken phone–
thin wires dangled into lines
on our palms, curved and infinite–
an atlas to guide the whispers
we cupped into our hands
at night.
I feared faraway screams
or the deafening sound of cymbals, shards
of metal launched from the hinges
of what was thought secure–
I did not expect
in an instant, without percussion–
I did not expect the fog, how sterile
it seems, like the afterlife, how it turns
the familiar into silhouettes–
to make this any easier.
(originally published in riverbabble, Issue #28, Winter 2016)
The fractured stone tunnel hollows.
Browned winter leaves
crackle into crumbs.
Birds’ humming stirs into
a white blanket of silence.
That’s when we deadlock to distrust
& wake, shirts faded, stained
with verbal gunshots. Never
too early for shared cocktails,
never too healthy, or sick,
for what you know to be lodged
in your esophagus, bits of
chicken & asparagus held
together as a spell, or a mantra:
shake me, martini, shake me.
Make me loathe a little more.
(originally published in Random Poem Tree, Winter 2016)
