I have a deep exhaustion
when an animal puts his head
on my lap I fall
ask anyone and they will say the weekend
is gone too fast
you sleep through your dreams
the train whistles
the beating heart
of your partner next to you
asleep through the lost time you share
(originally published in Pirene’s Fountain, Summer 2024)
If you are going to pass out
on my bed on my leg in the
middle of the afternoon, I
want to pass out, too, though
I’ve drank my coffee, been
unemployed for months, and
lived before then long in the
shadow of love, an animal
sheltered, content, hoping
for a small breath of light.
(originally published in DoubleSpeak Magazine, Spring 2023)
I sit by the fan
this May afternoon
alive forever
in the green
of our home-
made salad
(spinach, chickpea,
yellow pepper, tahini),
sore and sweaty
from carrying air
conditioners up
steep hallway stairs.
Using the heat-
gun and pliers
I straighten
my brain’s
antenna.
Our argument
becomes static
on a tube TV
in someone
old’s living
room.
(originally published in San Antonio Review, Winter 2023)
Because Tony once said he knew
Columbus and Los Angeles the way I do–
I have not yet developed a poetry of
place for Pittsburgh. Three years in and
still the surprise hills, the way I always
feel– still– an outsider wending my way
through confusing streets. I’ve worked with
Kailee’s dad longer than I lived with Paige
and still we haven’t had a deep conversation.
Everywhere I go there remains a sense of some
thing deep that needs explored. The way
I walked Los Angeles streets at night–
the endless sprawl– must be the same,
but Pittsburgh’s smaller, the graffiti
more familiar, how it’s all a sketch of home.
(originally published in Vilas Avenue, Winter 2023)
I did not listen to my inner
monologue when it told me
to stay home and watch
The Novice. I went to Trace
Brewing when it was bright
but you sat in the dark
when I needed light. I
said one drink, one drink
only, then on the two-block
walk back the clouds
were down, they felt
attached to you and
I kept stepping on
plastic bags and
scrunched-up napkins.
To arrive home I had
to bisect my conscience
and wait: how much
of myself to give
after giving?
The water tower
in the distance
a perpetual blue
balloon.
(originally published in DoubleSpeak Magazine, Spring 2023)
Maybe I’m not as angsty.
Don’t need to drown
in the drone of lost
love. The haunted house
no longer my dwelling.
My ghost still the past
but not possessed by
obsession. The passage
of time a lapis lazuli–
ten years of wisdom
in which my sadness
may look the same,
but now able to withstand
a storm without music.
(originally published in Stickman Review, Fall 2022)
we walked a horseshoe through the Strip
ginger whiskey coffee whiskey honey whiskey apple whiskey
no matter what I always see this brand-new city
slamming glasses into a blue-skied table
what’s passed around we finish swiftly
while friends attempt to maintain some order
never too early to rush into a burger order
time being what it is
we consume all we can
(originally published in DREICH Magazine, Fall 2023)
This fixture you forgot
on your back patio.
You say you are confused–
how did that turn on? It has
been months since I last visited.
I say the light is a metaphor
for our friendship. Big plants
sit in chairs in your brown-fenced
garden. Don’t know how close
to be anymore. Never get too close.
A tomato vine peeks from a planter
above you. Gardening’s a hobby,
inching toward the thirty you fear.
An August birthday during the lost
summer and you toss a squeaky
blue ball in my general direction,
more wildly as the night goes on,
and Lola retrieves it every time.
You say she slept upstairs with
you for the first time. We joke
she didn’t fall immediately, that you
had to tell her to turn the television
off, stamp her cigarette out. With our masks,
I only see your eyes smile. I hope you notice
mine. It is dark, as it has been for months,
and we try to stay illuminated, despite
these killer particles suspended
somewhere in the talk between us.
(originally published in Bindweed Magazine, Summer 2023)
Whenever I meet a person
I like to think there is
a string tethered between us.
Not a cobweb or rough
rope but a violin, or a cascade
of violins, the song within you
within each person, too. I see
you in this coffee shop across
the block; thus, we are connected,
intertwined forever whether you
go to the space station or not
and I am stuck in Akron,
cursing God as ground-
dwellers do. Inhabitant of the heart–
in this world of small worlds,
this blue sunken sea I’m clung
to you at its depths, you cling
to me with the urchins
on your shirt, the breath
in your lungs my own,
each molecule moving
the way we together move.
(originally published in Poetry Salzburg Review, Summer 2023)
Above me, wing soundwaves visible, a flapping
back to easier days, a communal grass I could
not know I was missing, but did. Voices in my head
clamor for them, always, from windows in the bathroom,
the glowing lights’ buzz, this temporary body, not simply
the hands washed, nor the heart, the mouth, the tongue,
each breath, each thrill, each paper airplane landing on
its own brown rectangle of nothing.
(originally published in Unlikely Stories Mark V, Winter 2023)