The Cortland Review:
Vespers
Sun streaks through the house, naked,
at eye level.
You raise your glass of wine. It catches the light,
turns to rubies.
You drink to our son’s health—more a prayer
than a toast.
We’ve done it again—returned home.
Swallow the quiet. Switch on the oven.
We ought to climb the hill to the railroad trail
and pace out the last light.
We’ve been putting one foot in front of the other
for so long. Left, right, left, right into the sunset.
We know we’d glow when we arrived back
from a walk—lungs capacious, warmth blanketing.
Instead, we settle for the memory of doing it. Gaze
out the window at evergreens turned evergold
and the long fence shadows looking more solid
than the palings.
Inhale the ginger and onion baking
among the bok choy.
Bathe in the melancholy of our failures,
half-sweet in their inevitability.
Picture our son awakening from his opiate sleep
to catch the end of a day, wondering where he is
and where he’s left his phone.
Sheila-na-Gig:
Her Last Garden
—with a bow to several great poets of gardens past
The watering can, the clippers, the gloves,
the basket, the pail.
The groan of the gate grown heavy with years,
the scrape of the rusted latch.
Birds fall silent in the heat but the hinge sings come,
pass through. She heaves the sagging gate upward,
clearing the clods clotted with moss, uplifting the sphagnum
that fringes the bottom of the pickets.
The gate, once white flaked grey, now grey flaked white
and frosted with lichen.
Her heart hitch-kicked over the fence and is waiting for her
on the path whose pavers lie buried under grass.
Here, here, she’s in this garden now, not the last walk
but one of them.
Spent hollyhock stalks bend toward her cheek, seed coins
pour from their purses.
She passes wilding white roses clenched three to a fist,
their leaves grown frail, brown age spots on yellow.
Something there is that loves an old woman. Her basket weaved long ago
by who knows whose hands, who knows where.
One morning soon, she’ll sit down under the ash tree
and never leave.
Wait for it to come, what’s coming. Choose to have it here.
In this smell. Late summer.
They’ll search. They’ll come upon. The watering can, the basket,
the pail, the footprint of her boot-soles.
Painted Bride Quarterly:
Trace
I’ve taken to drawing shadows. The outline
of things. Uncomplicated. Gutless.
Stick my drawing paper to a square
of louring light on the library wall.
Catch my subject. A few leaf blades
in the rays’ pathway.
The outline is the whole cloth. Look
at Ellsworth Kelly’s plant lithos.
It’s all we need. A few curving lines.
Truth in the omissions.
I want to be emptied like that. Kara Walker,
make a silhouette of me.
Two dimensional black on white.
Illustrate that I was here. Just barely.
Pangyrus:
Didn’t I Fuck You Once?
I’ve left the old Juilliard building,
am waiting for the #5 bus
in the dusk of my first October
in New York. Strolling by,
three trick-or-treaters smack me sideways,
swing me seasick, rout their hands
under my shirt, up my skirt, cup me—
heart-heaving me— in their newly-
adolescent hands. Above, the pious spire
of Riverside Church. Across, a noble-
ized soldier, high and white on his horse.
My two hands against their six.
Leotard and tights, sweat-glued,
keep them from my skin.
I writhe, the boys in cling,
into the empty-wide street.
If a car hits me, we’ll all be hit.
But there are no cars. Not a soul
but the four of us and General Grant.
Not a sound but my huffs and oofs,
and the bells of the famous carillon.
Until, as they are lifting me off my feet,
the glorious accelerando of a bus.
They drop me and I land in a deep plié.
The doors whap open and I fall
into the belly of my savior.
A year later, I’m outside the great gates
of Barnard, piercing a stream of humans
erupting out the 116th Street exit from
the subworld. Our eyes meet and hold.
The leader of the trio, now fully a teenager.
He swerves to pass me close, and when
the sleeve of his jacket brushes mine
and his mouth isn’t far from my ear,
he hiss-whispers the title of this poem.
Anomaly Poetry Anthologies:
Gone
I cook ahead for someone who may never
dance the doorbell. Shiitake earth-broiled,
scalded asparagus shocked by ice, chopped cilantro
reeking of life—throwing its scent around me like arms,
bearhugging me, saying Don’t think
about death—while the last tomato of summer
whispers Give it up. Kiss me and the corn
goodbye.
I can no longer look a dead animal in the thigh,
could weep over a wishbone. The closer I get
to being a carcass, the less I want to ingest one.
If you accept my invitation for the holidays, we’ll gather
‘round the yule log, sip potato cheddar soup.
At the last glimmer in the hearth, we’ll pull the plug
on the twinkle lights. Kiss the darkness
hello.