After we leave, me and the photographer,
cramped in my car, talk how it must be like
to live to be ninety. How free and young
we are to zigzag the curves of Laurel Canyon
near bullet-speed, windshield wipers
screeching in rare California rain.
(originally published in Open: A Journal of Art & Letters, Winter 2022)
Driving west to Columbus from my partner’s house
in Pittsburgh early morning and on I-70 around six
in the rearview there’s a giant burst of orange light nearly
deafening in its glory and my first thoughts are fire and fury
then you’re gone but no it’s a heavenly sunrise and I can’t
remember the last time I witnessed the sun rise though a few
days ago she and I were in Vermont about to hike an
overlook before sunrise to watch it but we couldn’t will
ourselves out of bed and what a world to wake to now
driving alone this big dramatic ball of fury revealing its
magnificence bathing land in light before it softens
how it could have been one or the other
a burst of beauty or unspeakable tragedy yet from a distance
a bomb might seem as beautiful and harmless as a sunrise
at least until the smoke how with fire too there’s a kind
of enchantment but for this a split second then the anguish
and fury for this sunrise greeting a thousand grieving days
(originally published in Old Red Kimono, Spring 2018)
In Kathleen’s apartment in Oregon,
I ask her where even is home?
Clevelanders-turned-transplants,
maybe never knowing.
I see my mom’s mown lawn
in the green fields our baseball
team travels through, my friends
in tweets spitting scores or stats.
These, I don’t care about,
but I join in discussion.
Blue hands to high-five,
then to put my phone down.
(originally published in Hobart, Winter 2018)
my mother logs in
watches lives unfold and bend
others offer words of glass
water droplets
like there used to be something there
something that refreshed and renewed
(originally published in The Stray Branch, Spring 2018)
as we gathered to mourn
the puppy struck by a car
outside of the bank,
i was reminded of glue:
how it encrusts fingers; if
it could seep through skin
it would sleep in your lungs
& heart & hasten the path
to the common rest
they couldn’t have fastened
the coffin with glue– too cruel,
they said–
if your hand could even summon
the will to move
a square, red magnet fastens
your snow origami valentines forever
to green construction paper, tiny prayers
bottled
i hope there is another side, even when i open
the door for orange juice, cool breath of air
within, glass, it breathes, infested
with my own fingerprints, tartness
prior to the swallow
& acceptance– for as long as i am,
you are, too
(originally published in VAYAVYA, Spring 2016)
Hi, I am Rob Delaney.
I am not Rob Delaney
and he would never begin a five-minute set like that,
but before California dangled blackberries
above my granite mouth,
Rob showed us the way and the truth and the life
(John fourteen-six by the score of silent thumbs)
god, twitter fame was the only thing
that could bring us nearer gods we do not believe in
this big bang of a perpetually expanding following
we cannot fully understand
by choice I never listened to robins
conducting high-frequency symphonies
(but I did read Last Call of the Passenger Pigeon
by Daniel A. Hoyt that summer
and could form the parentheses of a whistle
enough to calculate the slow kettle of tea)
my father would sit on a pig stump
(an oak whose life he ended himself)
and watch birds fly the superhighway,
clouds like rush hour in L.A.
like some hippie saint claiming
all that is God
is not man-made
I always thought of bird-watching as a way
for the elderly to augment their loneliness
now all the young men I know
fetishize loneliness in themselves
(originally published in LEVELER – Summer 2015)
