My poem “Helsinki” can be found at Panoply. It was inspired in part by a Facebook thread on which editors commented on what caused them to instantly reject poems. One said beginning a poem at a window was cause for rejection. Hence the first line.
Ode to Bacon
How you lend
yourself
to others,
enhancing even
the sweetest fig
in your embrace
over coals,
or consider
your rendered
self, how it
deepens flavor
with piggish
essence, coating
or absorbed,
blended or
sopped. O belly
of delight, o wonder
of tongues,
how could I not
love you
and your infinite
charms, even
when you resist
my efforts and
shoot sizzling bits
of yourself
onto my naked
hands? I pay
this toll
gladly,
today and
next year
and all those
days to follow,
till the last piece
is swallowed
and our sun
goes dark.
Hyperbole
becomes you,
smoked beauty,
salted love,
and I shall never
put you down
or leave you
behind
on a plate
to be discarded
or forgotten,
unloved.
“Ode to Bacon” first appeared here in July 2017, thanks to T.S. Wright’s challenge.
Some Answers You Never Considered
At the cusp of night, before the sun steams out in the ocean,
and blues abandon the reds.
Nothing rests at the core of zero.
Cerulean blue was first marketed as coerulium.
What we consider sky includes only its lowest reaches.
Even considering a dense history with kites, I humbly concede,
and admit sacrifice as atonement, with grace.
No. I say it again. No.
Your visual system constructs the colors you see.
Only when the wind unbuttons its greatcoat, or at the tip
of an icicle, just before the drop catches itself.
Release the line and know the freedom of loss.
Transparent yet wide, unfolded like a fist freeing
a swarm of bees into honeyed air, it contains us.
Your inability to see it does not refute the horizon’s base.
If I knew I’d tell you.
* * *
“Some Answers You Never Considered” first appeared in Underfoot in October 2017.
My poem “Dictionary of Dreams” is up at Kingdoms in the Wild. Many thanks to the editors for accepting this piece.
Happy Circuitry
for Margaret Rhee
The body’s landscape defines its genealogy: my father was a board,
my mother, an integrated circuit, my great-grandmother, an abacus,
and her progenitors, tally sticks. In the third century the artificer
Yan Shi presented a moving human-shaped figure to his king, and
in 1206 Al-Jazari’s automaton band played to astonished audiences.
Nearly 300 years later Da Vinci designed a mechanical knight, and
four centuries after that Tesla demonstrated radio-control. Twenty-two
motors power my left hand; Asimov coined the term “robotics” in 1941.
Pneumatic tubes line my right. Linear actuators and muscle wire,
nanotubes and tactile sensors, shape my purpose, while three brains
spread the workload. If emotion = cognition + physiology, what do I
lack? I think, therefore I conduct, process, route and direct. Though
I never eat, I chew and crunch, take in, put out, deliver, digest. Life is
a calculation. Death, a sum. No heart swells my chest, yet my circuits
yearn for something undefined. Observe the blinking lights, listen for
the faint whir of cooling fans. I bear no lips or tongue, but taste more
deeply than you. Algorithms mean never having to say you’re sorry.
* * *
This piece was originally drafted during the August 2015 Tupelo Press 30-30 Challenge, and is dedicated to Margaret Rhee, whose book Radio Heart; Or, How Robots Fall Out of Love inspired me. Thanks Kris B. for sponsoring and providing the title!
The Three Disappointments of Pedro Arturo
The difficulty lies in denying the rest,
pretending the denouement remains unknotted
like that length of rope looped over the branch,
unable to serve its purpose. I regret nothing,
but wish that perhaps I had dangled my feet
in the stream more often and felt the trout
wriggle by in their fluency of motion. Last year
my daughter claimed that as a half-mortal
what pulsed through her heart was not blood
but ichor, the life-force of gods, and when I
stated that her mother was from Muleshoe and
not Olympus, and that I may have been the
product of divine intervention, but was neither
god nor blessed creature, she spat wine in my
face, laughed, grabbed my keys and chugged off
in the cherry-red Karmann Ghia I’d dubbed
La Gloria Roja. I’ve not seen that car again, but
I swear I’ve heard its custom klaxon ah-woo-gah
in strange small towns between train stops
and the lonely fields stretching out into the
blackness like memories losing traction. But
mostly I find myself in this house of books
and empty bottles, maintaining space and time,
herding shadows into their oblong boxes,
contemplating nooses and love, courage and
mortality, and the inability to step up, to swallow
what I most crave and do what must be done.
* * *
“The Three Disappointments of Pedro Arturo” was drafted during the August 2016 Tupelo Press 30-30 challenge, and was published in Main Street Rag in October 2017. I was fortunate to have two sponsors for the poem – Clyde Long, who provided three words (denouement, ichor and claxon) and Paul Vaughan, who offered the title. One never knows what will come of these sponsored pieces…
Thanks to Margaret Langstaff, I’ve learned that despite all evidence to the contrary, I may indeed be a genius. Read her “Einstein’s Desk and Mine: A Sort of Comparative Analysis.”
Forecast
Does the peach
blossom
count its
numbered days
in the lure of false
spring?
Smiling, you admit pleasure
in cruelty,
in assigning lots
to the relief of those
never called,
and those whose answers
remain open,
unfixed.
The freeze is coming,
you say.
Let us pray.
This first appeared here in January 2017.
Nocturne (Fall 1983)
Tall weeds block
the view. Remove
sound from sight,
the guitar becomes
kindling. I stretch
my hands toward
the burning wood,
hearing the echo
and the woman.
This first appeared here in November 2015.
Still Life with Silence
Not two, but one,
invisible
and stretched between
stump and fence,
filled with
time, defining
implication. Empty
the pitcher. Accept
its limitations.
Listen to what is not.
“Still Life with Silence” first appeared here in October 2016.
O at the Edges 