a red serpent lives inside me
keeping venom in my blood
and I don’t mean this as a sin
or shame but rather a reality
like toxins in the grass and
in the fruit we eat, everywhere
everywhere silent killers lurking
in the stems of tomatoes growing
rapidly, the chemicals in me
and in your child, oh god,
there’s a serpent in your child
and if we yank it from his throat
our serpents will bite and bite
until we forget the garden
(originally published in The Beatnik Cowboy, Winter 2024)
Fortune: lines lead somewhere
hopeful, but a jumbled mess.
Our palms wrinkle quickly.
We’re at a loss to say.
The American Interstate
is visible from space.
City lights a horde
of blinking phones.
Severed cables hang
over every intersection.
Tires, wires, water bottles
amassed hill-high.
A crow watches from the top,
her head in and out of smog.
(originally published in Evening Street Review, Summer 2022)
everywhere around the world.
I learn this at work, a television
production office. A film would
frack lands surrounding its sets
were it to save a few hundred
bucks– you thought I’d say lives?
What powers that be? We’re alive,
yes, already pulsing red rivers
breached with microplastics.
The jingling adds up in my veins.
When I read forever chemicals,
I want it to mean love
but it is in the way we will
suffer together, forever,
oil rigs raised, still, all
over, hands up in ugly prayer.
The burning questions I want
to ask I can’t even stand
outside in a storm and be satiated.
(originally published in A Thin Slice of Anxiety, Winter 2023)
and will work too much the next.
Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is diminishing–
I’m in the office sixty hours a week.
How was I supposed to know
to gaze into a distant glint?
I haven’t seen a star in years.
If not under a canopy of clouds
a canopy of smog.
If I had a kid she’d be grown now.
Instead our world is warming and
I drive down the street each day
guzzling jugs of precious resource–
we’re waiting on the water wars.
The water wars are now.
(originally published in Sybil Poetry Journal, Winter 2021)
If I live a modest life I won’t know what it means
when the pipes burst or the banks bust. Either means
money I don’t have. Meat the Earth has. I’ve wanted
to travel but I know airplane fuel results in polar bears
dying on dry soil. Think Coca-Cola commercials with
the Arctic night preternaturally night. No snow, no
snow, and after airtime you crave Coke.
(originally published in Quince Magazine, Fall 2020)
I am a sitting landfill beef
lettuce special sauce
a sepulchur in my Ford
& in this warm January
the trees are still dead
one eye open I imagine
forests stretching tired
legs & staying silent when it’s time
to speak spring
(originally published in KAIROS, 2017)