I skip pebbles in milk
while Colorado calls
my name an open field
prayer hands clasped
with two best friends
I have not seen
in years pass clouds
over the Rockies and I
am drunk staring at
my past blue yearning
the rain-drenched range
I write and ring cells
still new cities call
my name with headphones
on I play The Last of Us
in dark glow hands reach
for two best friends I sit
in silence happily
(originally published in Pennsylvania Bards Western PA Poetry Review, Spring 2023)
We know it is us
who wish to quit the moon.
We close our eyes our jaggedness
could drive the sun away but never
in the way our metaphors could.
Still we write the moonlight
into the sand and growl
at the tide
and again
when the tide returns.
We cry from the shape
our lives took to intersect–
an hourglass
filled with sugar,
or a snail. Or a million
hourglasses, a million snails,
a million glimmering shells
in a measured slowness.
You were talking about the sunrise–
but I never wanted to look.
(originally published in Thin Air, Spring 2016)