Poetry

As a child, I hid to read your waves, nothing can lie in water. I wanted to peek through your wreckages, wrap your wind around my breath, I wanted to keep your sand, shells, and all your shores. The water’s reflection slowly peeled fear from my skin, women sang to the ships as if the…

We think we can find the beginning, the origin, the genesis. We look everywhere, the nativity is nowhere, Jesus is absent. The land is lost, it doesn’t speak these languages. The sea keeps its own history. We keep our own images of our bible, our Terra Santa. When you came you found what’s modern, what’s…

I figured if I studied enough, life would make sense so I skipped the games and the girls, ate lunch in a hurry and spent the afternoons in the library. On Saturday nights when everyone was out gunning their engines, I camped alone at the beach listening to the lap of waves and the chittering…

The oracles say the quiet part out loud. A wife is a machine of someone else’s dreams. To survive, you must drown a heart that wants to float, muscle atrophying in salt. Make an artifact out of your pain, a tribute to the girl you used to be. Ignore the hot pinch in your chest…

Was it madness that enabled you to fall into the ocean— if you were “dancing” on the rocks as I’ve been told, it could have been loss of balance—we say that of the mad don’t we, I can see each taunting lift of foot, the bitten hands flailing, I can, off East Haven more than…

1. They sleep on their shadows, long for no one, their speech drifts weightless through their lanes. Gold thread, fistfuls of barley, a jar of Aristaeus’s gold, an old woman’s needle, her pearly lace lining the harbor road. Taxis for Darnis awaiting passengers, Sudanese farmhands milling about, and into the bay, the sponge pickers go…

Like a pomegranate, I wore my garnets quietly. Nude lip, beige tongue. I took the shape of clouds passing by. I was a tool for divination—you used me to find water & blamed me when I drank. We dreaded you together. Still, I kept my smile on, even when you hid the key to my…

Just there, deep in shadow, the peeling paint of an old door to a carriage                     house behind untrimmed cypress branches, a shade somewhere between turquoise and navy wrung by rain to                     namelessness, a color we can no longer locate on the spectrum, the lost blue of tenderness                     and sorrow overlain with exaltation, a door we…

His beard’s still dark but a little grayer. I, too, have a gray hair or two twisting through the dark ivy between my legs. Honestly, I’m surprised he recognizes me standing up. He looks well, fit, his smile as generous as I remember, all those times on my back staring up at a faded picture…