Meditation is mellifluous
melody ignoring the choo-
choo train inside my head,
but I have been growing
better, forth in time.
There are meadows
I will never enter – renter
of everything. Nothing I meet
in this life I keep. Honest. Lover
bearing forever strands
of hair? God, infinity is
so infinite when glimpsed.
Such the rose moon
grows on this
specific sky.
(originally published in Count Seeds With Me, Spring 2022)
plastic cups
pepsi seeds
dandelion dumpsters
pickaxe
shovel dig
our potholes
drought soil
vegetables
waiting hoping growing
(originally published in Peeking Cat Poetry, Winter 2018)
You cannot gut a tomato without first
remembering the garden. The mud-rutted
fingers pulled at weeds; silver shovels spiraled
to and from the sky. The spit, the rain. It took months–
years– didn’t it, to differentiate? To grow into something
unrecognizable? You knew what this would become,
the way a person finds her own shadow
insufficient. A broken silhouette of scarecrow.
It was then I could not see you– with your bangs
of hay, the ground sprouting milkweed.
Those tired hands milled ‘til the sun had no meaning.
You wore dark clouds as a cape stained
with mud the work helped us forget.
(originally published in Ground Floor Drinkers, Summer 2017)
The days when we would lay
on blue towels by the beach
combing through our Merriam-Webster
holding every fascinating word by the stems in our mouths,
our vibrancy was inseparable from gardens
full of hyacinths and rhododendron and zinnias
and, yes, forsythias, all these flowers in our hometowns
we never knew the names of
until we saw the words on sand-shorn pages,
said the names out loud, grasped endlessly
for petals in each other. No, we bloomed
laughter from our throats, planted seeds
into pits where absence grows in ensuing Aprils.
We never knew what words might appear
on Scrabble nights hunched over grids of possibility and–
strings of letters string surprising words together.
Marionettes, spider webs, violins, shoelaces,
your hair among the rules of nature, and nurture,
here nurturing the garden, here the home
where we tend other flowers– all my love,
I repeated. Forsythia, forsythia, forsythia.
But those beach days were distant, the tide slurring
softly alongside my returns from long unexplainable workdays–
all my love, I repeated. For Cynthia.
Wooden tiles tornadoed to the floor, slapping
the carpet with words we had not invented yet–
there is no remedy for lost trust. The flame
already sleeps in the bed of the mouth.
Cynthia, Cynthia. I did not know a Cynthia–
but I had never been able to name a forsythia
in the wild. The next time I see one
will feel like cheating. Nothing too-known is magical–
there is wonder in inventing nomenclature,
that a word like forsythia can only be made
in moments like anesthesia, with darkness descending
like the cigarette clouds of a severe storm when, in the drift
into a new consciousness, a lilac floats your mind’s pond–
a lilac, maybe, though that’s not what you want,
and maybe, in the distance, you see the blossoming
yellow that accompanies spring, the air golden around it–
the beauty that’s grander than words.
You wish you never learned the name for it.
(originally published in Sheila-Na-Gig Online, Spring 2017)