Poetry

First date, bowling alley. Poor choice, no chance to talk, one of us always taking a turn. When he bowled, his hip curved, same stance as when he played trumpet, school band where we met. After two games, still silent, we held hands in our center lane, the eye, movement all around us, bowlers, spinning…

After Camille Dungy’s “characteristics of life”                                Today I misheard the word eternity as the trinity. I was looking at those birds, falling from the sky, thousands of them, a photo of their corpses in the Times, lined up on a white sheet of paper, like words. Warbler. Flycatcher. Swallow. Eternity. Trinity. Die-off. An airplane…

—for Richard McCann At first it was unacceptable— strangers dressed in black, walking away or toward a hole in the ground, each a version of you. Seven hundred reasons to dig holes in the earth—some look for water, some need a fence. Some for this seed, some for that body. my God, your body. When…

When the home-aid nurse comes to check on my mother’s drainage tube I am sharpening my knives with my new Bavarian edge. When I hear the nurse say proximity to the toxin, I entertain the thought that disease might be seen as a measure of intimacy. A knife is my favorite kitchen helper. Come a…

What you snuck past: a vast  copper body, two plastic hands  all the better to twist you from  this empty palace. You are not yet  who you will be, little sac  of yolk, blood clot drifting through.  What should we do with you  who bedded down in a field  of red clover? You want   a piece of cake, meat silky  and tender, slipping…

The old city rushes into me as soon as the plane descends, and my drunk bravado shudders. I swear to myself that I will not confront my family with my suffering this time around. I’ll be a civilized person instead and keep longstanding resentment to myself. Even the part of me that is gristle and…

O cotton-headed kissful. Tender liking of my broken skin. Fierce betrayal of instinct wrapped in embers and undiagnoses. I have missed you. I think you might have been just the first of my forbidden desires, artifact of my deep impulse to transition a thing to another thing. Take medicine and turn it into a weapon….

I don’t know what death is either, I think, unplugging the earbuds and ordering a decaf latte, iced. I don’t know where my father is, or mother, or where to tell my daughter she can find me. I watch the barista make the espresso shots—her down-to-there, sapling arms, the left one hanging lifeless while the…

When I needed a Barden bumper for my bumper-less truck, I walked through a junkyard: bolts & gauges on the ground, wheels rolling nowhere or steering nothing, dead headlights illuminated by sunbeams. A bird alit on chrome. I shivered at the delicacy of what I could not see: a laugh & This is my favorite…