Poetry

          Sometimes, we let ourselves believe we’re talking to his ghost. Sometimes, we think memory, its rhyme.           How long can you stay           afloat? my sister asks when he admits to paying his ex-girlfriend’s rent again. He doesn’t care           that she’s seeing other men           and avoids his calls— doesn’t care that he owes back-taxes and hasn’t held…

Where are the flying stars of my childhood? Evenings lit like a glitterball’s sparkle against the night’s dim walls. Their absence is like aging: one less pulse each year. I want my childhood of darkness bedazzled again with shards of light— my tiny lighthouses, my suburbs of surprise— where the shadows of dogwoods and crepe…

When she comes to take you away she asks if your ring comes off. You twist and twist. You surrender. Celeste says it will come off later. In those next hours so many doors open, none of them returning you to me. A man in the atrium below plays piano— an ambling, jazzy, wine spritzer….

A mast year for acorns, so like marbles and so many we’re afraid of falling. I walk sideways down the hill, holding a long stick; Kate goes before me wearing her orange knit cap. Everything alive is changing. Everything un-alive is changing. What did we think to stop? The broken trees lean on the unbroken…

So, I’ve grown less apparent apparently: the young men walk their dogs, and when our dogs meet we look at the dogs without raising our eyes to each other. The fathers stand outside the elementary school laughing with the mothers—Exactly, one of them says to the other— my passing presence faded like a well-washed once-blue…

The featured pop star’s voice was too big for the waterfront  pavilion. That’s what the reviewer said. Her recent poignant hit  flew overhead, drifted right out the open sides  of the white tent, somehow tugging us with it, flinging us toward stars where we hung briefly before landing among jellyfish and buoys.  Once we were…

After seven nights of silence, he woke to seven drawings of a ram, pinned along his walls. Spit six seeds in a tin cup and trailed his hands along the white hall singing about something to do with morning. My father sat his easel in the musical and was a farmer, but wanted to be…