Poetry

Social Security

You have to feel your feelings     Right now I feel amused, uncomfortable, tolerant, with a twist in my heart, as if I’m applying for a visa to the country of unhappiness and sorrow which gets mixed reviews on Trip Advisor. In this waiting room, we are all seedy & hopeless and the elephant…

In High School

I miss the charcoal drawing of gallium that hung in my chemistry class. How the metal whose melting point is below human body temperature was misspelled galium, how the hand cupping the silver goop stopped at the wrist. I don’t think it was meant to disturb, to invoke a caught thief. I don’t think the charcoal spreading…

A Postcard from St. Barts

An Elvis impersonator curling his lip as he limbers up for “Return to Sender,” a wave may develop   that slight curling of the lip till it becomes a sneer. Not that a wave may more than slightly develop. The character of Snare   becomes a sneer no less than Master Fang, the character of…

Moral Compass

When I gave up praying, an $800 windfall arrived in the mail and no longer did I brew my tears into a bitter tea that paid the bills.   Though it turned out to be surplus in the escrow account, once I’d have chalked it up to God—that unexpected check a biscuit for the trick…

Weanlings

The whale was real.                                         So was the beach, carsick                                         & damp in the armpits as I was. Father’s shaggy hunk                                         of leg against my young flank. The crowd on the shoulder                                         of the road watching the crowd                                         smoke around the whale I mistook for a stranded barrel.                                         Did it outswell the ocean                                         with breathing, was…

Wanting a Child

This condition is not like hoarding for winter.                     There may be no torpor here,                                                                        no feast, either.   I see a fox, petrified in bog water.                     I envy the gall wasp, its egg                                                                a pincushion on the oak leaf.   This disruption will likely stay                                                         unnamed. I call it                     faceful of dove. I call it…