Tag Archives: questions

Reticent as Ever, I Follow the Map (with recording)

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Reticent as Ever, I Follow the Map

This old bed, knowing our secrets, our love
for the spiders of the world and their guilty

pleasures, wraps its history around us, says
“go easy, my friends,” and leaves us to our

research. I find the scar on your lower
back, that sacred heart of fusion,

trace the line on the map to the freckle
of grace and its inequities, then up to the left

ear, which requires attention. Speech
can only intrude upon my navigations,

yet I can’t refrain from murmuring the words
again, those never-tiring, never-depleting

syllables which always demand repetition,
wave after wave, an ocean of truth,

mingling and dispersing, accepting, giving,
swelling larger and more complex each day.

 

 

 

 

“Reticent as Ever I Follow the Map” was published in July 2019 at OPEN: Journal of Arts & Letters. Thank you, Jeff Streeby, for taking this piece.

 

Driving to Work, I Pass Myself

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Driving to Work, I Pass Myself

Some days the drive takes twenty minutes,
on others, thirty or more. Seems I might pass
myself on the right morning if time flexed its
biceps or looped me into a dimensional shift
thick with donuts and tires and lost minutes.
How odd it would be to wave and say “see ya,”
knowing that tendered frustration grows in
distance, until it takes over the entire mirror.
Looking back, I see my frown diminishing
to a lone point in that shrinking van at the
hill’s crest. Will we meet in the parking
garage? Should I wait? You know the rules.

 

This first appeared on the blog in March 2018.

 

Another Poem Up at Green Lion Journal

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broken trees

My poems “What Follows” is live at Green Lion Journal. Many thanks to editor Renwick Berchild for taking this piece.

 

Down and Away

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Down and Away

How soon we lose the scent
of our first love’s

body, that odor of perfume
over sweat and uncertainty

and the overwhelming surge
into what will never again

be new. You shake yourself
back, wondering

if falling stars could choose
to rise again, whether

they would rejoin the firmament
or simply retreat deeper into the

ocean’s black, cooling, sliding
down and away, slipping

free of regret, evading forever
the sun’s long fingers.

 

 

“Down and Away” was first published in August 2019 at Trestle Ties. Many thanks to Juleen Eun Sun Johnson and Aaron Schuman for taking this piece.

 

 

 

 

Poems Up at Green Lion Journal

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Rubble

My poems “Been There” and “Rockport” are live at Green Lion Journal. Many thanks to editor Renwick Berchild for taking these pieces.

 

On The Burden of Flowering

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On the Burden of Flowering

Even the cactus wren
surrenders itself
to the task,

though it rarely listens
to my voice. How do clouds
blossom day to day

and leave so little
behind? The bookless shelf
begs to be filled, but instead

I watch the morning age
as the sun arcs higher.
Yesterday you said

the mint marigold
was dying. Today it
stands tall. Yellowing.

 

“On the Burden of Flowering” first appeared in Panoply in August 2016, and is included in my chapbook, From Every Moment a Second.

 

 

Worms

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Worms

Yesterday’s cored apple buzzes with light,
another vessel stored in sadness.

I have swallowed vows.

I have replaced air with earth
and enjoyed tongued flesh.

To think is to live. To live is to delay.

Burrowing through the soil’s rich
decay, this body,

accepted. Absorbed.

 

 

“Worms” was first  published in Rue Scribe in September 2018.

 

(Hotel Eden) In Full Light We Are Not Even a Shadow

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file5691252161803m

 

(Hotel Eden) In Full Light We Are Not Even a Shadow

Which is to say clarity persists in
increments, in the silent space between
color and lens, within parables seen
in the incomplete: straw, hand. Imagine

white valued more than manner as hidden
thought remains obscured. Lower your eyes, lean
forward. Perspectives tilt towards the mean,
suggesting purpose. When we examine

intent, do we find it? The irony
of bottled cork, of sullied paradise,
a coiled wire, the parrot whose voice,

unheard, implicates us. What felony
must we commit to admit the device
in play? Pull or release? The mimic’s choice.

 

* * *

Notes: “In full light we are not even a shadow” is a line from Antonio Porchia’s Voices.

Hotel Eden is the title of a piece of art by Joseph Cornell. An image may be found here:
http://www.wikiart.org/en/joseph-cornell/untitled-the-hotel-eden-1945

DSC_1972

This made its first appearance here in March 2015.

 

Poems Up at Wildness

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Four

 

I’m thrilled to have two poems up at Wildness, a topflight journal out of the UK. One of the poems has a curious history – written in 2013, accepted quickly but not published, then rejected sixteen times over the course of seven years before landing at Wildness. Such is my life in poetry…

Many thanks to editor Michelle Tudor for taking these two poems.

Dry Well

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Dry Well 

I trace the symbols.

In the dirt, among the grubs and crooked
weeds. Writing of loss. Of missing things.

Wondering if words will fill my mouth
with wool or grit. With pebbles and salt.

If truth is what I want.

 

* * *

 

“Dry Well” first appeared in Vox Populi in August 2019. I’m grateful to editor Michael Simms for his steadfast support.