Lost amidst the sea and swirls
I am floating past gates of white
Misty waters and depths below
Seal my fate / a weeping demise.
Washed ashore / the aflame home
My brethren trudge past mud and sticks
(They’re all knowing and yet none-the-wiser)
I am found beneath sand and drunken tidepools.
Awakened through a crack / beating sunlight
Gathers the souls of my people… my people…
Dark mouths stretched across
Leering into saltwater sacrifices.… ...continue reading
My college history teacher said:
white flour fed oppression—
a false staple that starved nations
while filling the conqueror’s plate
Empty offerings persist,
served now on Styrofoam:
flimsy triangles of dough,
sides of ranch dressing,
class sets with covers that read
Of Mice and…,
corners curled, pages thinning—
a curriculum worn down
to a narrow canon
classrooms frigid in winter,
stifling in early summer.… ...continue reading
My dear, I have become an expert on you.
The survival of my love requires new skin
to hold the pigments of you,
a mechanism in your design:
one that absorbs your light
and then reflects it back out,
steeped in all your colors.
Chameleon—
study in your iridescence,
if only to animate your face in mine,
that singular expression.
I’ve assembled it a hundred times
on features that do not belong to you
but ache to see you,
speak to you,
know you—… ...continue reading
It all happened in a little blue house.
I find that detail important, because everything was blue.
The walls, the furniture, the bed.
I began to see nothing but blue.
Feel nothing but blue until eventually I was suffocating because I forgot that humans can’t breathe underwater.
I tried to mend together the sun and the ocean
Tried to convince them they belong together.
That one cannot exist without the other.
But how do you mend a hole in the sky when your thread is made of sand that crumbles when you pick it up.
How do you wish the sun to save you when you’ve forgotten what it looks like?
– T. Martin
Author’s Note: “Blue” is about the house I lived in during the worst time of my life.… ...continue reading
To lay a hedge, in the traditional way,
a farmer must cut a small tree
almost through at the base
leaving just a bit of living wood and bark,
then bend it over, flat to the ground
to encourage new growth.
A long line of these wounded trees
send up shoots which are then trained
to form a dense thicket of vegetation
to contain livestock.
A defining boundary.
Smaller mammals, birds, and common toads
take advantage, inhabit, and flourish in this bosk.
Julius Caesar was inconvenienced by these types of hedges
as he campaigned across Belgium in the Gallic Wars,
enough so that he complained about them in his writing.… ...continue reading
I.
Time travel to the past
through these still hot ashes
tethered to a place and time
now unrecognizable. The history:
you remembered by you
as shovels sift through.
II.
Under blankets
sweat.
The waking abrupt.
Dried bouquets hung
upside down from a nail
in the attic stairway.
III.
One day there was a disappearance.
Then there was a year.
Then there was a sickness.
Then the heft the cortisol had
packed on dissipated
a slow relief.
IV.
Vu ja de
something familiar happens
but it seems new
V.
Out on the beach the line between
apparent in the slope.
Sand from each length of shore
keeps in glass ornaments.
The plastic ones melted together
redefining geography. Edges slowly
collided. The line between no
longer clear.… ...continue reading
For Charles Simic
The spoon is still on the table,
its small mirror holding the ceiling.
Nothing dramatic happened
just a chair pulled back
and a silence learning a new shape.
You taught us
that history eats quietly,
that angels prefer basements,
that the ordinary object
is already a confession.
Somewhere, a fork listens
to a war it cannot stop.
A shoe waits for its foot
like a thought refusing certainty.
God is not absent,
He is distracted.
You knew how laughter
survives the century,
how terror keeps house
inside the refrigerator,
how a poem can be a joke
told to the dead
that they understand immediately.
Now the world continues
without permission.
A streetlight flickers.
A man misunderstands his life.
The universe shrugs
and means well.… ...continue reading