we need not gather
rice in the trash sticky
with friends’ hands
still friends their hands
a question of what we collect
these rakes our long limbs
(originally published in Penmen Review, 2025)
distance
Sine
sometimes I am too conformed to the shape
of music to hear the trapeze and
trampoline of flute and synth flinging ever
toward the eternal soundscape. pigeon
percussion next door the clanking spoons
below– I think we need distance.
Your heartbeat swells across soundstage,
no stethoscope, no starlight though once
we wanted to be famous. or want. it is
complicated. we are more paranoid
of strangers than ever before. that’s
no baking sheet, it’s rustling leaves,
not your shoes or mine. You ask
questions I don’t have.
(originally published in Pirene’s Fountain, Summer 2024)
House of Mirrors
in this house of mirrors look around you
all around you looks at you if you think
you are out of sight of stars remember
light itself is the mirror the stars
made you the stars own you the stars
constantly surveil you the sun
itself shines its light at you for hours
because it must know you will soon
sin though you never believed in God
the sun will whisper I am your sunshine
your only sunshine and every other
source of light will seem ninety-three
million miles away and in
no rush to reach you
(originally published in Flush Left, Winter 2023)
For M.P.N.
I wish I still had time to write you letters
but I am stuck between branches with heavy
workload. I want to commit again to art, at least,
to singing songs with you on the beach under
natural harmonies of seagulls. The forest froze
under another frigid season, so I come to shore
in a long trench coat, alone, held firmly between
two worlds: the one in which I don’t have time
to do everything I want, and the other, in which
I still don’t, but keep your words dangling close.
(originally published in Academy of the Heart and Mind, Winter 2021)
Transient
I need new faces
clothes drawers
opening
closing
I used to find
spacious greens
county lines
my hometown
I wandered
through the smells
of mom’s scrambled eggs
faucet running
disposal clogged
with garlic
understand
I want to be
a bullet train
memory
I’ll tell my future grandkids
stop moving
opposite
of me
(originally published in Neologism Poetry Journal, Summer 2017)
*Pushcart Prize Nomination
The Undo Feature in Gmail
Sometimes I say what I don’t mean.
There is an algorithm which can make me forget;
the others remind me to remember.
Your action has been undone. As if my actions
needed a separate undoing– I did not expect you,
with your raven hair, to perch our thousand
miles, thousand days to bottle time
and cast to sea, a folded note to be read
by a stranger at shore. Here, I am a knot
bound to be undone, tethered to a battered shoe,
and in the sprint, wind coarsens your hair.
In the cold we move closer and closer until the breathing
is stale and fogs my car’s windows, the outside world
turned gray. Confusing a fluorescent lightbulb for the moon,
I would risk one more rejection to bring you even nearer,
past the point of no return.
(Originally published in Corium Magazine, Spring 2016)