your drunken bed / the absinthe
& worm / I waited / in the candle
-light for dead lovers / two apartments
ago / downtown / how the spirits
summoned / lingering
lust / cigarette smoke
living / rooms stained
sweatshirts / rugburn turtle
couches / bleeding
fabric / and sex
(originally published in streetcake, Summer 2019)
After Gray Clark
I need to quit my job as the caretaker of people
who surrendered art to come home from work
and watch television. I can imagine acrylic
burning a canvas for eternity. Giving up
mattered to me a year ago. It will
matter again in a year.
(originally published in Flypaper Magazine, Winter 2018)
We inhaled fog on the Golden Gate
along with traffic exhaust.
Foghorns cried names
we did not recognize.
Car horns, names we gave ourselves.
From this high, you said, there is no good
way to fall. We scrunched our fingers
to encapsulate the small
fragility fog brings– how, in a moment,
everything can change / fog
of ghosts rippling waves from long-
passed boats / fog of sitting in silence,
windows down / fog of steel cable’s
fading red / fog of missing
what we lost while sun cuts a way
(originally published in Eunoia Review, Fall 2016)
Before you had a name, you were a stranger
searching for one.
Gravel, asphalt, salt, and stone–
I pieced you together, a church from scratch,
your holiness in my uttered breaths
of limestone, mortar, love…
your tall steeple stabbed the sky.
I could hear clouds dissipate,
crows caw and congregate
in our mutual worship of you.
Maybe you never needed a name.
When you vanished, my heart
reconstructed itself with God’s rubble,
compounded from type-two plastic,
Coca-Cola cans, rubber bands…
I never learned your name. With my mouth,
my body aflame, your steeple burned.
Bricks and timber screened
the sky. The smoke and fade–
the gray, the fog– that
was your name.
(originally published in Pudding Magazine, Winter 2016)
I listened, during that foggy morning stroll
on the Golden Gate, when you alluded
to what it must mean to jump,
how it must feel to fall.
The foghorn blared every five minutes
from some ship we could not find beneath us.
We peered our heads over the low railing
and inhaled the gray.
Red telephones rang in our heads.
I can still hear the ringing
from the hotel’s broken phone–
thin wires dangled into lines
on our palms, curved and infinite–
an atlas to guide the whispers
we cupped into our hands
at night.
I feared faraway screams
or the deafening sound of cymbals, shards
of metal launched from the hinges
of what was thought secure–
I did not expect
in an instant, without percussion–
I did not expect the fog, how sterile
it seems, like the afterlife, how it turns
the familiar into silhouettes–
to make this any easier.
(originally published in riverbabble, Issue #28, Winter 2016)