Category: Poetry

my fingertips comb the hairs on your thigh,
an evergreen flesh; my lips press upon your chest,
but i must ask,              is this what you need?

my bare shoulder intercepts your blossoming
kiss, and i fear my nakedness offends your loss,
but you insist                          this is what you need.

you aim to forget, for a lustful moment,
how you watched his chest wilt and crumple,
but i still think,                                   is this what you need?

your family members rip dozens of peduncles
from the soil to place in your hand, but you say
that something dead                     is not what you need. 

will my hands, my tongue, my red canna expel
the pathogens from a mind you yourself call warped?
you told me,             this is what you need.…

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The palm reader, garbed in a cascaded Romani dress,
red headscarf & golden hoop earrings, took my tired

hands in hers. She whispered, my dress suggests I am
pure, I’m free of illusion &, with your spirit-trust, I’ll see the

trails leading into you. Into all you hide from. I’d found
her accidently, off an old road w/ moss-tongued trees

& a few junked cars, rundown & lost. Two dogs, their
soiled faces peering through fence slots, & a wet garden

of vegetables hard-hit by nibbling rabbits & whitetail deer.
I was a man of blackened branches, looking for what

might have moved in me, had I willed it or wished it so.
She leaned close to me, felt the flexure lines of my hand,

those deltas of tension – longing, remorse, yearning, hurt –
& said that the hand is an un-funneled richness until we,

w/ in a life, create paths upon it that our imagination –
as a genie – creates its freedom & its hard bondage in,

&, by & by, we arrive at it, this truth, like a stunned doe.…

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The night never asked permission
to swallow her whole,
my mother, with her frayed nerve endings
and shattered mirrors for eyes,
her mind a house with too many doors,
each one opening to a different self,
a different terror.
I learned silence from her trembling hands,
how love could twist into something sharp,
how the woman who gave me life
could look through me like a stranger
on a crowded street.
Pain is not a lesson,
it’s the first language you forget
but your body remembers:
the hollow where safety should be,
the silence after the scream,
the way your ribs ache
from holding so much alone.
They never tell you
how lonely healing can be
how you’ll trace your scars
like a map to places
that no longer exist,
how you’ll miss the monsters
because at least they were familiar.…

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It begins, as most things do, quietly.

I wake just before dawn, pulled by a strange pull in my chest. I flutter outside, the world hushed and silver under a heavy moon.

Past the trees, past the fields, I find the pond.

I kneel, peering in.

At first, I search for my own reflection.
But the water only shows ripples of light – tiny glimmers, darting and blinking across the surface.

I am a star–
distant, steady, burning high above,
a fixed point to guide, impress, or outshine.…

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What’s been has been. What’s done is done. Now you
can only decide what you’re going to do
about it, for one; and then say, for two,

Let’s Do It! These concerns are ethical,
the strange marriage of the emotional,
a heart’s involvement, and the logical,

a mind’s. But neither aspect’s any good
without resolve to do—not what you would
or might, having determined that you could,

but should and must, for you now see it’s right,
like someone blind given a spark of sight.

*

Of course it will be difficult to start.
That’s why it’s called a Difficulty, friend.
Taking action means we must take heart;
giving over means we just pretend.

Inertia, loud as leaders of a faction
and expert in invisibility,
seeming stillness, and false recusancy
is the eternal enemy of Action,

particularly one that bucks a trend;
eternal ally of The Sloth Within
Us, it will terrorize until The End—
unless we notice, pause, resolve, begin.…

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After she figured out what to do with her life
or the rest of her life or maybe just next in her life
she discovered the years months weeks days hours
minutes seconds lining up and waiting to be filled
although with what exactly wasn’t terribly clear.

Here was the question behind all the others:
what to do with this seemingly endless span that
was in fact finite or the fact that her demise was
only a matter of time and yet the exact instant in
all its startling specificity could never be divined

or the way mortality made a mockery of her effort
to figure out what to do next given her life might
end at any moment this seemingly ceaseless array
of years months weeks days hours minutes seconds
needing to be used lived spent then suddenly not.…

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We’re in the ultrasound room. I stare at the blank screen, it having only my information on it for now. It’s last November again. We’re here for the first time and all I am worried about is if the internal wand will hurt. Our doctor’s words remind me: honestly, it’s probably smaller than him. I never knew no baby was even an option. My tests told me positive, my symptoms told me pregnant. But the ultrasound showed that these were true and not. We both stared at that screen. Silence. We didn’t know we were staring at our miscarriage. But it is not then, it is today— so we stare at the empty screen and hope not to repeat history. The tech remembers us.…

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