Voice sings through static
in the dark.
God forgive
me my body–
jumbled
chirping syllables.
One at a time. Heartbeat
crinkling in a sugarpacket.
Sand on beach.
I’m thankful. No one
inside
but you.
She asks what you want.
Ministerial. Ocean
breeze
through open
window. Flat stale wall.
What do I need?
More salt, more salt, more salt,
amen.
(originally published in Punk Monk Magazine, Summer 2019)
Nicole walked out of Aladdin’s yesterday
which is why The Exterminator is working
12-8. He claims to have trained himself
to have a perfect, photographic memory.
He has Kool-Aid hair and anime eyes.
After the shift a group of us and
The Exterminator go to Brubaker’s
for drinks and we smoke in his car.
He is no different outside of work.
Constant buzzing, endless movement,
dead wings everywhere. He says
he learned his dancing from night
walks at 3 AM, and we all picture
his headphones in the darkness:
sudden hand movements, a quiet flying
his neighbors would never notice.
(originally published in Children, Churches, & Daddies, Fall 2021)
pancakes we talk heavy locomotive engine
steam billows out this whale blowhole this
top of mind wisp say something anything
wrong always sugar sweet the stacks
I want to speak doesn’t connect you eat
a hole through final pancake as to
puncture the flour we had bloomed
over the last year and half eternity
we could lose in the vast distance
across the table cerulean walls
surround us in new distance
enclosed and suffocated open
air a quiet din to gorge last
bites by window sunlight
your blue marble eyes I
can’t meet halfway
mumbling
(originally published in 24hr Neon Mag, Winter 2019)
I steep myself deeper
into the capitalist game
the rubber hoodoos
of the rack
complicity is my zippered mouth
and I walk with papercut
cardboard out through
a parking lot of gnats
I open heavy squealing doors
to place waste in a dumpster
floating on a non-potable puddle
(originally published in borrowed solace, Winter 2019)
Funny, thinking back, the restaurant– hell,
the industry, those incessant phone calls
in the midst of rush, my snaking past
corners with three plates of hummus
and shawarma in aluminum, warm
from the kitchen, only to waste
in a stranger’s presence, scraps
on porcelain I’d bus, then zigzag
through the floorplan of tables.
Funny, thinking now, how little has
changed– insecure in economics,
I’ve jumped the lilypads of job
after job, the backbreaking work
of conforming, of each return home
with something new to say but I’ve
said it, I’ve said my best, my cap-
stone thesis shredded in California,
back when full of possibility–
I desire a bowl of time
loops. Cereal in my milk.
I didn’t even use silverware
in college, a joke inside a riddle
presented as a gift I constantly
unwrap, umbrellas of green
folding into myself in the rain,
suffocating, blinding, this pirouette
of place, this unfixable sedan
screaming off the shoulder
of the highway, smoke
signals ablaze and late
for work.
(originally published in Little Rose Magazine, Winter 2019)
he says
I’ll do the hard
part not that you
can’t then cuts
a plastic bag
with scissors
and syrup
goos out
into a metal
cylinder and
I’d rather you
do the time
intensive part
of mixing
with hot water
and hands
me a white ladle
so I begin
in slow circles
when Monique
walks over
and whispers
you’re stirring
the pot
and stays there
beside me
these last weeks
of working
there umami
broth burning
steel I lift
the red
handle up
to stop the
flow
just past
the line
(originally published in LEVELER Poetry, Summer 2018)
Your lunch spot becomes a haven on the ground
level of a tower between towers on rainy workdays.
Your eyes strained at the sight of a waterfall
of text and maybe you missed
an important error in copy
marketed to clients. Here, though,
the dishwasher sprays a thousand plates,
aiming spouts at cheese stains hardened
from sitting by the garbage in
the place where discarded trays should be.
Water pressure removes ceramic sin
eventually, an industrial machine
humming in silver efficiency,
skin rinsed beside it.
Glasses that pass the spot test emerge,
steam rising, but meat lodged between
prongs is wrestled out with wet finger.
Your fork drips from the steak
just in a salesman’s mouth.
(originally published in Stickman Review, Spring 2018)
On the way home from my first Passover
with your family we stop at an Olive Garden
in flyover country, where the waitress tells us
Happy Easter and, when you tell her we forgot
but still want angel hair, she jokes her last
table mistook pesto for alfredo. Sometimes
people confuse one god for another but never
their own, and food is ours– Jesus rising
with the dough of endless breadsticks
descending like ten plates of plagues, first-born
bastards in baskets we need no hunt to find
lest our mouths become black holes absorbing
absurd sanctities of tradition. Separately,
the Garden was where our families would gather
on intermittent nights to write our own Haggadahs
or speak sins of rock stars or mysteries
of faith. Afikomans for truth, perhaps, but instead
of matzo an endless bowl of a salad of words
in which we always beg for more
forgiveness without really wanting that.
And the waitress, before engaging the simplest rotor,
asks us to say when to end airstrikes of parmesan
and it does not matter when we do.
(originally published in After the Pause, Summer 2018)
I’m with Lex at Lockview
ordering tomato soup because
I just got out of a relationship.
I tell him I’m fine, though he never asked.
The bowl arrives alongside my Kentucky Bourbon
Barrel Ale. I slurp red and talk loudly
for the cute girl at the table behind me
wearing all black– we made eye contact
waiting for tables between entrance and exit–
she doesn’t hear me, probably,
but my friend watches me cremate crackers
over the bowl to spoon the goo inside.
He says slow down but I say life moves
fast– hell, I ingested magic mushrooms
after leaving my ex’s place then Lex
asks our waitress for his grilled cheese
without mushrooms and the waitress asks for menus
but I hand her my bowl and say take it please
take it then tell her I’m fine and it was wonderful
being in my house alone after this happened standing
on the kitchen table beside the silver chandelier
lined with black mold and dirt and how
I waited for anyone to come home
and no one did so I kept standing.
(originally published in OVS Magazine, 2017)