The sea is so vast I feel helpless when your voice comes mangled through my cheap speakers. I press pause because I hear something pained and honest in it that our years of pixelated letters failed to transmit. It’s like you knew about the secret poem I wrote last month about wanting to drink coffee with you and forgetting your accent. My voice is present for you through my poetry. […]
This is the country god made for us: hard scrabbled and scramble egged; frustrated with fusion, soft and easy; every object of our affection in-between. Suddenly there is no one left I wish to talk to: a click of feathers and hollow bones, the bird away, the dog excited, and I am not among the living as I wish to be. Nor am I among the dead. […]
Go on; enjoy yourself. I’m not returning home this winter. I don’t want to make the mistake of another year, Missouri a long way off, full of superstition, omens, and witch’s meat. I’ll miss the ripeness of soil, the grazing river, wild turkeys, possums in the abandoned car, the red fox living beneath the house, voles camped in the hills. Some things need endings more than others, superstition a heavy […]
–Man’s rejection, God’s protection. I am exactly like I am. No water of mistrust here. Swamps, perhaps. The heavy coil of wood. Bones to go with it. There was no landscaper in your life, there was no man without a car, there was just me: The brake in the stomach feels no pain; the break in the heart, everything. White hair of frost, powder and grey, the […]
Your grandmother loved me from the day we met but not enough. She told you you should keep me, as though a Boy Scout badge, something to put in a shoebox or sew with thin stitches onto your sash. Keep her. I wasn’t repelled by her stories of viscera, of reaching into the red cavity, gripping the muscle, squeezing when it wouldn’t, reminding it of purpose, meaning. The bones […]
On a whim, we drove to Vegas and lost everything but the three-fifty stashed in the glovebox for the breakfast buffet. The red pleather booths and geometric orange and brown pockmarked paint reminded me of the Sambo’s my dad used to love. I told you, and you snorted. “That place! They shut it down.” Your barrel chest, soft around the edges as it has always been, shook the warped linoleum […]
Together we make up one half of a set of quotation marks. Both bodies curved in, paired arcs, resting on the crux of back to chest contact, we create an opening: here, your breath asserts don’t worry to my left ear inhaling whispers, she’ll never know at hairs on the nape of my neck. Exhale, it could always be like this. Turning towards you, I transform us […]
Palms flat across the cover of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa. Or, the History of a Young Lady, I press down hard on the neatly tucked edges. Here, finesse is key as is timing and picking a book large enough to contain the blossom. Petals fanned out, pale-pink filaments and pistils— I open and close, swipe and smooth a few times to even the press. Likewise, your hands ease me shoulder then […]
The world can be correctly described using various concepts of “the existence of something.”— Eli Hirsch If we have souls they are probably in our hands I said peering into my beer bottle. The floor leaned and you tilted your head that you heard me, drank the last sip of your beer, and sloppily spun me on my barstool. I slammed my shot of tequila forgetting the salt and […]
This might have been a love poem but a phrase stumbled, wiped out a whole line. It glanced away, distracted by a muscular policeman just as it stepped from the curb, and found itself sitting in a parking lot bruised and slightly bloodied, propped against a rusted Honda. When strangers offered aid the poem became surly, churlish; it had prepared for tenderness and passion: dressed in his favorite color, donned […]
Melancholy Hyperbole 