My poems “Letter to Schnee from the Stent’s Void” and “Genealogy Dream” are live in Issue 4 of Lost River literary magazine. Many thanks to editor Leigh Cheak for publishing these two.
2 Poems Up at Lost River Literary Magazine
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Tag Archives: memory
Feeling Squeezed at the Grocery Store I Conclude that the Propensity to Ignore Pain is Not Necessarily Virtuous, but Continue Shopping and Gather the Ingredients for Ham Fried Rice because That’s What I Cook When My Wife is Out-of-Town and I’m Not in the Mood for Italian, and Dammit I’m Not Ill, Merely a Little Inconvenienced, and Hey, in the 70’s I Played Football in Texas and When the Going Gets Tough…
Feeling Squeezed at the Grocery Store I Conclude that the Propensity to Ignore Pain is Not Necessarily Virtuous, but Continue Shopping and Gather the Ingredients for Ham Fried Rice because That’s What I Cook When My Wife is Out-of-Town and I’m Not in the Mood for Italian, and Dammit I’m Not Ill, Merely a Little Inconvenienced, and Hey, in the 70’s I Played Football in Texas, and When the Going Gets Tough…
I answer work email in the checkout line. Drive home, take two aspirin.
Place perishables in refrigerator. Consider collapsing in bed. Call wife.
Let in dog. Drive to ER, park. Provide phone numbers. Inhale. Exhale.
Repeat. Accept fate and morphine. Ask for lights and sirens, imagine the
seas parting. On the table, consider fissures and cold air, windows and
hagfish. Calculate arm-length, distance and time. Expect one insertion,
receive another. Dissonance in perception, in reality. Turn head when
asked. Try reciting Kinnell’s “The Bear.” Try again, silently this time.
Give up. Attempt “Ozymandias.” Think of dark highways. Wonder about
the femoral, when and how they’ll remove my jeans. Shiver uncontrollably.
The events in this poem took place five years ago. Life is good.
May I Be Familiar
May I Be Familiar
Do we find you in what you’ve left or where you’ve gone.
In words you could not form, or forgot long ago.
Missing the pastels, the shades, all nuance.
With moistened hands, I pat rice into a ball and wrap it in seaweed.
By my reckoning, the word who no longer implicates.
Ritual accumulates significance in memory.
Forgotten fruit on the sill. A whisper nailed to the wall.
Honor and pride line your earthen home.
Though you never did, I pickle ginger. Make takuan.
The transparent house reflects no gaze and contains no one.
Gathering your absence, I coil it around my body.
* * *
“May I Be Familiar” is included in my mini-digital chapbook, Interval’s Night, published in 2016 by Platypus Press as #10 of their 2412 series.
While Trespassing I Note the Sadness of Old Fences
While Trespassing I Note the Sadness of Old Fences
I write poems when I can,
in late morning or during
the afternoon, between chores
but before dinner. And sometimes
I duck through spaces
void of wire barbs, and consider
how to fill the incomplete, which words,
what materials could repair
those particular holes. I cut my own
fence once, to access our house
when the creek flooded the road,
lugging uphill through the snake
grass a jug of scotch, my mandolin
and a watermelon, essentials for a weekend’s
respite. To be truthful I cut only the lowest
strand, to help the dog get through — I
was able to climb over, but he couldn’t dig
through the limestone rubble to wriggle
under, and we’d come too far
to simply turn around.
* * *
This appeared in riverSedge, Volume 29, Issue 1, released in October 2016. I first encountered riverSedge in 1983, and vowed that one day my poetry would be published in this journal. It took a while…
Another Bird, Rising
Another Bird, Rising
The shadow behind you slides over
the ceiling, up and gone,
a wingless silence. The drafted swirl.
One morning shifts into two, and still
you won’t give in, each moment’s
gasp another one earned, a measurable
notch on the table’s edge, quarters
in the magic purse. They all count.
Pills, chemo, radiation. Ocean to sky.
Houses to ash. Your eyes see black.
“Another Bird, Rising” first appeared in deLuge in fall 2016.
Simplify, as in Forget
Simplify, as in Forget
To turn off the stove
or close the refrigerator door,
such brazen attempts to win
the aging contest or blur the mirror
of clarity — you won’t say
which to blame or praise
or whether intent is implicit in
action or if I should hold my breath.
What is the freezing point of love?
When you were cold, whose
belly did you curl into, whose ear
gathered your breath and returned it
warm and with the promise of bees
producing honey? Your name floats
above my outstretched hand,
and unable to grab it, I blink and turn
away. Nothing works as it should.
I exhale. You push the door shut.
* * *
“Simplify, as in Forget” first appeared in the print journal Good Works Review in February 2018.
Martín Espada’s “Letter to My Father”
I was fortunate enough to hear Martín Espada read this poem live last week. It’s a powerful piece to read, but listening to him perform was especially sublime. You can do both at The Poetry Foundation.
Henry Lee Remembers Grandmother’s Garden
Trigger Warning: This poem, from the viewpoint of a serial killer, is the creepiest thing I’ve ever written. After reading it, my wife said “I’m not sure I want to share a bed with the man who wrote this.”
Henry Lee Remembers Grandmother’s Garden
I smile and recall the sparrows,
wings separated from their torsos
and nailed to the cedar fence
like so many unachieved desires,
an occasional feather ruffling
in the breeze, simulating flight,
their power now all mine to savor.
Art begins in the heart’s
crotch, compresses through the ribcage
and up the vertebrae, drills through
the skull, directly behind the eyes,
emerging as idea, as will or compulsion.
Or release. I loved those birds,
pulling them apart, arranging their
pieces by odor. How, rising from
dirty little mounds, their outstretched
feet squeezed the air from my
lungs, sharp bursts scattering
into the sun’s evening gore. I have
attained no higher state in the years
since that day. While the flies and one
lone wasp buzzed happily around me,
proof that wings claim neither heaven
nor earth, that godness lies within,
I lay there in the splendor
of the torn and detached, among
heads and crops, my fingers caked
black and stiff, wondering which
treasures, what other
sweetness the week would bring.
* * *
“Henry Lee Remembers Grandmother’s Garden” first appeared in Taos Journal of International Poetry & Art in February 2017. I’m grateful for editors Catherine Strisik and Veronica Golos for featuring my work in their journal.
I’d read an article on what not to write about – reminiscences of grandmothers, gardens, birds and so forth – and couldn’t resist inserting those elements into a poem. The editor who wrote the article rejected an earlier draft of the poem…
Black Lilies
Black Lilies
Flensing words, slicing deeper: all, nothing,
red to redder. Their skin, paling to nothing.
I speak today but you hear yesterday.
Black lilies in the chill of nothing.
Drifted apart, the two halves reconcile.
Yellowed, whitened. Older. Both stitched in nothing.
How many words have we lost to morning? Shredded
syllables sparring for sound. The nothing of nothing.
A coated voice, turquoise and calm, spreading across the room.
Buttered light. Pleasantries, unfolding. You, being nothing.
The language of night sleeps unformed in my bed.
I remember your hand on my cheek; flesh forgets nothing.
* * *
Another near-ghazal, “Black Lilies” first appeared in ISACOUSTIC* in January 2018.
Forgotten
Forgotten
Is it simply forgotten
or not remembered?
My father coughs
through his days,
asking for answers
only his brother knows.
Some books are better
read from the end,
he says. I don’t know
what to do.
He tries to spell his name
but the letters elude him,
teetering between symbol
and thought and choice.
The chair tips over
when I lean too far back,
replacing memories
with hardwood
and a new bruise
coloring my thoughts.
This word, that one.
A face, the date.
Last Tuesday’s crumb.
The floor accepts us all.
* * *
“Forgotten” first appeared in ISACOUSTIC* in January 2018.
O at the Edges 