rain I am trying to provide
like you the red cardinals
pecking at ground forever
holes into deepness a guitar
wailing thunderstorm solo
concert of flashing lights to
burn the world’s an AA chair
& I’m mumbling into the air
I wish was your ear shawled
with your black hair & warmth
my teeth nibbling the edge
until it gives
(originally published in Home Planet News Online, 2017)
We waddled over grates along train tracks
on a bridge above the river until a trembling
warned of what would come: soon, one of us
will leave the other. Running to safety in flip-
flops, it would not matter how it felt when
we held each other after stumbling off rail into
field because you said you finally found a thing
I’m scared of: the in-between of tracks. Heart
beating odds with brain. As the train passed,
horns blaring, you spoke something I could not
hear when we hugged as each car blurred forward
until we became a quiver, a silence, a kiss of
faded smoke dragging steel beyond the hills.
(originally published in Four Ties Lit Review, Fall 2017)
(originally published in Typehouse Literary Magazine, Summer 2017)
was full and yellow in summer
but we arrived in autumn
when the sunflowers were withered
and drooping brown
to the ground
stem necks snapped perhaps slowly
and knowing nothing of summer
we lost our sense of fall
and we joked maybe someone
came to kill them all
but the local bookseller said
it’s just too late to grow
so we wandered past closed
shop after closed shop
thinking about the lovely things
we heard this town would offer
but knowing the dead sidewalks
with each lonely step
it was only talk
(originally published in The Write Place at the Write Time, Fall 2017)
Your mud. Here,
we count days.
We walked Santa Monica
to the ocean. There, we removed
our shoes. Held them
by spines to dip
our feet. I love where
we have been. The more we walk,
the less we know. Either way it ends
yet the water takes
and takes, and by the door
we wait.
(originally published in Northampton Poetry Review, Summer 2017)
The bowl is where
the howls come from–
OoOoOoOoO!
A broken-record werewolf
in this microwave-boiled,
tomato-red September.
I have been trying to form
the words to say to you
with only a vowel.
When you left
for some knockoff white-hat,
greasy Chef Boyardee
I went to the zoo
to study manatees,
but they, too, are a migratory
species. I saw the first of its kind
take on a mangrove but emerge
fish-in-mouth. She floated to her
friend or brother or lover
and squealed syllables
until the other swam away.
I guess no one communicates
with each other the proper way
anymore. All these sounds
these OOOs and Os
processed uneaten
(originally published in The Oddville Press, Spring 2018)
If you drive a car whose
combustion confuses fuel
for air, the engine will quiver
along smooth concrete.
At certain speeds, a clanking
rotor is similar
to the natural cadence
of heartbeats in embrace:
amplitude becomes a deafening
in the stillness of night.
Let a rotating machine of mass
be mounted on a stiff spring
to fix support. The pieces
must move vertically in
a single degree of freedom
even if the rotor is unbalanced,
its hypnotic center missing
one valve’s intake,
forgetting the other’s exhaust.
(originally published in Lakeview International Journal of Literature and Arts, Summer 2017)
everything springs to life
again your last
relationship your new
relationship these are strings
on never-ending
balloons with brains inside
of them and hearts
at the center of the brains
beating thinking
if we fly a little higher
there’s no going back
(originally published in Dragon Poet Review, Summer 2017)
got a heinz bottle full of regrets
but it’s dried up as the crust of red’s
lost its use you try to squeeze something
from an old heart and look how flappily
it beats sags and wheezes yet I got a cold bag
of wendy’s to share salted and soggy
on our porch in december rain I said
to go to be tax-free and carefree yes
but on the swinging bench white-bagged I see
your face in wendy’s and your eyes some
sad fake black pocket’s full of lint and loose change
and can’t stop sliding my hands in to feel my legs
burning with desire to get up and build trash
cans from scrap at the edge of the yard
then wait for the passersby
to throw their guilty pleasures in
(originally published in FLAPPERHOUSE, Fall 2017)
