we need not gather
rice in the trash sticky
with friends’ hands
still friends their hands
a question of what we collect
these rakes our long limbs
(originally published in Penmen Review, 2025)
holiday
End of Week Two (Happiest Season, 1/31/20)
at Tessaro’s after a long sunless
January mumblecore weekend
beginning no one to vent to
Pittsburgh bars of cig smoke
without windows I can barely
come up for air in the work
in which we say it all works
out in the end despite wanting
a cigarette having given it
up years ago just to again
(originally published in Nauseated Drive, Winter 2022)
Christmas, 2017
I heard last year Uncle Keat
lost his sight, and nobody
has seen him since.
Tonight, my oldest brother– waiting
on a kidney, unable to walk–
unwraps a flashlight.
A gift of hope, I suppose,
what we lose we tend to replace
at the end of a year–
the longer Dad’s dead the wider
entropy’s net consumes us.
Today’s the fabled white
Christmas, trail of footprints
leading into the woods.
Somebody gray-bearded
and familiar waits in a clearing,
hands cupped to mouth.
There’s no warmth in
red streams of wrapping paper
hanged from winter branches.
Uncle Keat was there,
we’re sure. Somewhere
his tether.
As if another dark
world with open jaw
awaits, and time
pushes us forward,
wheels squeaking
every now and then.
(originally published in Overheard, Winter 2022)
My Laptop Malfunctions on Thanksgiving
The machine shut down after clicks and pops– the screen
flickered bright then dimmed into near-zero
visibility. You said our love had become that,
crying into the dark on my chest. I couldn’t feel the tears,
but we feasted this Thanksgiving on the blood of birds
and the kindness of vegetables, this ritual of melancholy
holidays at my mother’s home, the knife pushing
deeper and deeper into the flesh of tradition, and you
said that’s not what you wanted to become, some reliable
device upon which to take for granted, and I apologized,
I didn’t know why you were crying and I wasn’t, so you
turned the lights on and laugh-cried until we fell asleep
(originally published in SHARK REEF, Winter 2020)
Christmas Tree
the christmas tree represents unity meaning in this room we want each other blue
lights intertwined with pines green and lust thus we hang our ornaments
watch the tree shed its skin onto dog-dusty floor. there are hooks and angels angled
in the high-up spots you asked me to reach sharing the sangria with melting ice.
we light the darkest corner of our poorly-lit living room charlie brown
christmas piano guiding jazz strokes onto our wandering hands gliding up and down
bark needle and sharp.
(originally published in Abstract Magazine, Fall 2017)
Mid-December
The alley is paved with old bricks
blackened by rain. I used to want
conformity, that tidal hope gripping
your gut. You must have a family soon.
Everywhere babies are sprouting
but garden sprinklers are off because winter
is near, crackled dirt longing for storm–
how long since the rough of gale and rain?
Seasons, in these frigid airs. And my seedling
heart stopped growing soon after its first beat.
(originally published in The Coachella Review, Winter 2017)
The Christmases That Were Forever
my own advice: treat every gift
like you’re nine in ninety-seven.
rip the heart out of your parents’
wrapping jobs. don’t notice
the hanging phone calls,
the coils of collection,
the foggy snarls at the door,
the stay-in-bed allure radiating
from big, red boxes hidden
behind the couch for after
we opened all the other presents,
for after we grew up,
after we got jobs.
(originally published in The Drunken Llama, Fall 2017)
Stepdad Thanksgiving
Phone Conversation with My Sister on Christmas Day
The trees are dead, she said.
Peering outside, it was true:
A still-barren sixty degrees, sun
meekly reveling in its new warm.
A week ago, our mother cut down the tree
we picked apples from as children.
They were small, red, never delicious–
brown and burrowed with worms
because anything sweet from the skin
isn’t as sweet as you might think.
All those colorful lights we tied around
the necks of plastic and decoration,
the way we choked the holiday,
wrung out the last ounces of life
from the animal ornaments on every pine.
The walrus with the broken tusk.
The hyena whose laugh can nearly
be heard. As if anthropomorphizing could
ever atone for the past but I would love
to believe in a world where a fragment of
a tusk means something is truly missing–
perhaps rickety laughter ringing through
thin walls, dominant as the wooden organ
moans his mantra: everything in this world
is connected. Not every connected thing
is aware of its living, its connection.
But the way fingers dance deep
resonance out of the organ’s shifty teeth
to provide holiness for the changed house
is the gift we must open for ourselves
with our hands full of music– a sourness
in harmony, an ode to shriveled apples.
(originally published in Flatbush Review, Winter 2016)
Skeletons of New Year’s Eve
I do not perceive you as obsessed with death
even if, days before, our jovial talks of dying
led to sugar-frosted blue wondering at the sky.
We planned to pop champagne for the birth
of feeling alive: winter hardens soil so we must dig
to the laughter we share in our spines.
We did not drink white wine, but the beer was breath
without knowing the scent– like any year,
we were paintings of light and dark, of limb
and bone so disordered to stand is a triumph,
and hope is a kaleidoscope, a conjecture.
Each dying wave returns, even at the frayed edge
of memory, how the dead are lavish with flowers
and stories. Still, we press on to uncork
our champagne future: drafts of breath in each
new year, dead waves haunting the mortal tide
with no specific beginning, no obvious end.
(originally published in Liquid Imagination, Summer 2016)