If I don’t watch it, this lake
is vodka and I won’t care I don’t
know how to swim. Getting sober
is like that. I go out into the world
and look you in the eyes and say
I’m fine. I’m having a good time
and you go on never knowing
I was half-underwater, that
there was a monster trying
to make its way to the surface
and I had to push him down.
(originally published in Rattle, Winter 2018 – nominated for Best of the Net)
I am a sun-drenched willow field withered and
purple. Headache remiss, wonder when the liver
will churn its nightly clarion call, squeezing rags
to drag the water out.
Sometimes the nights are like that in the silence
between friends. The drafts replace talking.
You can’t hear the words with breath so still
and distant, willows soon awakening.
(originally published in Transcendence Magazine, Summer 2016)
You suggested whiskey sours
so we left the reading
to walk the golden streets in rain
during the first warm day
which felt like hope–
a riptide cascading
through the chaos of cars
and people on city streets.
Like you, gravel is full of scars
and we trample it under our soles
without thinking.
What do we pray to but the future,
its corpuscular horseshoe
on her way? We are swift
without wind, carving footsteps
in Bukowski’s tattered ambitions.
And when we finally reach the bar’s
back patio with sour piling into our mouths
you strip to your white dress
and show me your tattoos.
We wanted the whole world or nothing.
The sun, the moon, not one or the other.
The stars’ breaths on the nape
of your neck. Every word tingles
the first time celestial bodies meet.
I am cratered with my drink,
this treat and chilled escape.
The staircase leads downward.
(originally published in WISH Poetry Press)
there are many flowers come across paths
alongside apartments but nonesuch like the
hyacinth rose wrapped tightly as such stands
outside a tiny market in view of black-grim
graffiti reading with a smile worth at least fifty
fifty-cent avocados because spring lays beyond
the peel of skin like waking up to jumbled
white sheets with the knowing of presence past
white walls hanged with stationary song which
would sing if only strings could strum themselves
(originally published in The Bitter Oleander, Spring 2015)