Poetry |
“My Mother’s Hands” & “By Chance”
“These are the hands / that pour his evening drink, / the one we all know / he should not have …”
Poetry |
“The Night Children” & “If I Had Been There”
“There’s no village, no country / that isn’t being mapped / by night children with their folded wings.”
Poetry |
“sobriety”
“i can’t tell you about the drinking / unless i tell you about the past // i don’t want to tell you about the past / because then you’d see me shake”
Poetry |
“Three-Legged Dog”
“She’s overweight and quick to cry, my sister, / who licks Jiffy from a tablespoon, who wants to know / why I call her husband an asshole in front of everyone / when he enters the room.”
Poetry |
“Tosca”
“When I dream, I dream / of emptiness. I am standing at the end / of a long hallway. As at the end of Tosca, / the dead all rise again, applauded / the same …”
Poetry |
“Come into the house / Come in now!”
“the yard is / her factory / everything / calls to / her to be / made”
Poetry |
“His Name Is Sam,” “No One’s Perfect” & “At the Church in Sacramento”
“I used to see him every week when we were kids / at the main public library. I would stare at him, wishing / he sat closer to me. Not once did I think he’d stab me.”
Poetry |
“Strangers in Our Own Earth”
“We have been made into something other: / something ancient, swallowed —// badland curves set from the once of subtropics, / maybe single-celled algae and zooplankton.”
Poetry |
“Circe in the Age of Instagram”
“Nothing is anachronism / if you live forever, it says // in my bio. I started with / carefully composed shots // of the island, sun filtered / through olive grove and arbor …”
Poetry |
“The Kite” & “The Unlikeliness of Empty Spaces”
“This is what it means to be in the now; / release a kite to the wind, / feel the tug of a string, / his small face turns up, / all fascination to the sky.”
Poetry |
“Legacy of Blue,” “Incarnations,” “Incarnation Intercept Sonnet,” “Riven, Driven Back” & “Jacob’s Ladder”
“But to keep vision / intact, I stand back, / asking nothing of it / but the sun’s stance / on the diurnal, / incarnation’s probe / of recurrence, / that fire I walk through.”
Poetry |
“A Reading from the Epistle of Horace the Paralytic at Corinth”
“Thus, our Lord / spoke even me, Horace Parlan — // Horace the Paralytic — / into historical bones.”
Poetry |
“The Garden State”
“I keep an artificial hydrangea in my vase, / its pale blue shot-through with khaki. // In Jersey, we called them snowballs, / so much fuller than roses, so weirdly azure …”
Poetry |
“Half the Hour” & “Measure”
“For a poem ‘Close Is Far and Figured’ I plotted stanzas and rhythm / simply to fulfill the title // “Close is far” back then was a sad young man on the crowded F train / his thumb slowly swiping texted photos of his mother …”
Poetry |
“Broken Coffee Break”
“I stroll up to my favorite out-of-town coffee shop/ and find it closed for good. Through the black glass,/ a naked counter, stools scattered, space thrown open / to conjecture and rats, stillness, indifference.”