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

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)