Poetry

  • The Mountain

    We were sitting shoulder to shoulder looking at the fires in the canyon and I said something about distance, desire   moving from archive to digital, I was thinking of starting something, despite time zones or children, husbands   or wives. The clouds parted an instant, I thought I saw the shadow of cumulus cross…

  • Stiletto

    What happens to good girls? They get presents. What happens to bad girls? They get tied up & locked in the closet.   A stiletto was first a pen, Then a dagger, Now a heel. Caravaggio’s Medusa was painted on a shield. The painting itself is an object of warfare. I wear purple marks from…

  • Volterra

    A day of Prosecco & maps. You inhaled the musk from my hair. You drove my childhood curves; I dressed in the part.   I rode shotgun in Your dead father’s Porsche. The car he never lived to drive. The car he never could afford.   Tupac took us up to the hill town, Bach…

  • On the Air

    “I have nothing at all to say But I want to say it anyway…”           —Marcello Mastroianni, 8½     In my perfect 6-year-old French I’m singing Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques. Dormez-vous? before the white caps and the waves’ salt spray—it’s the only song I know to the end, the only world…                                         Sun burning through the…

  • anniversary

    your way of avoiding me is just as good as mine—   one stone fence, one last little field—i won’t bother   anyone here if you won’t— but we ruined Saturday,   agreeing to just amble in the rain when really   the important strangers beckoned us   because they needed both of us at…

  • Whish

    Just for once, I want to witness the going away. I want to catch the moment, cup it in my hands, and see it blink and glow. But in this dream, the Valley Line shrieks from Grand Central hours before I arrive. Or I reach Port Canaveral after the Boatswain’s final call. I’m alone on…

  • Turning the Brightness Up to Bleach

    What we have made is flyover country.                     Gulch of drip-coffee pleasance, my beige blanket’s deafening                                           softness keeping the edges blurred.                            No glint.   Viewed from above the fields stitch together. Belief in the human quilt. Belief in turning away from the needle’s sharp point, belief that the gauntlet   valleyed by rage and time…