when the twine grays, know
there is still a lettering
shaped in your glossed spiral.
I gargle Listerine your name
to the thrum of the galaxy
lodged in my throat,
there forever
behind my wolf teeth,
a song alongside you.
(originally published in Revolution John)
Wait for the sun to shine past noon.
Palm trees quiver in a vortex of goosebumps.
The universe revealed itself
as a skeleton in the sky.
Vertebrae wisps, stoic.
Jets soared through bone rings
and whispered softly to faraway swans.
Gaze into the galaxy – golden
stalagmites in deep caves – we understand
that we scatter like gulls
only to congregate again
and dance above the sea.
All the swirling rainbow colors
in the reflections from puddles
unravel the universe
from a spool. As
thread slowly sways,
forget
what we understood.
(originally published in Syzygy Poetry Journal, Vol. I, No. II)
Swathed in bedbugs, draped
in the gloom of willing hearts
in collective song maddeningly
swept by enkindled starlight obscured,
fate sprouted flowers along
marshy graves and windtorn spokes
of the ethereal wheel of coincidences,
salvos brisk and violent, precisely when
the window-dead moth inched baby-bug steps,
when you plucked a magic eyelash
from a crook in my face, the numb
morning heat of your breath whispered,
in translation, morose and umber.
Now we wait, sanely, eyes closed,
for all the other things I wished
to bear gold in streets we walk
at night, hand entwined in yours.
(originally published in Glassworks, Fall 2015)
Not that I don’t want to walk the streets with you.
But when I sit on a suspended turtle shell
hanged from risen arms and don’t think it’s magic
is the issue. It should be magic.
We walked through spider webs.
Middle-school basketballers howled
like playing wolves behind us.
A rock split and whizzed past us like a meteor:
hurled through space and time
to find us here
and still barely missed.
Thousands of light years
on the pin of a needle.
Striking sandy bits of gravel.
Clanging like dropped silverware.
The fridge is packed with eggs inside.
Vodka lives frozen but still fills glasses
topped with orange juice. They swirl
and marry happily and end
in a bathroom, anyway.
As if chocolate swirls in ice cream
didn’t represent the arms of the galaxy.
Comets made of custard and fairy
dust move in high speeds and
travel in circles smaller than us.
I know at great range
there is someone else I will barely miss.
(originally published in Lines + Stars, Spring 2015)