Category: Poetry

Here is my acoustic guitar in a room by itself / with no memories or need for a past. // There is my drunk boyfriend playing poker, / the feral sigh of a cat outside.

Remember, sweets, my recurring dream / while you babbled in sleep beside me?

to know there is something you should / care to know so I come / ashore on a mainland / of you because I am / an island slammed

It brings him back to the seminary in the 1950s / when he found God everywhere. / None of his five children go to church, / but I promise to engage in regular discourse.

My womb was promised a child. / She exists solely for that purpose and yet I keep denying her / the chance to reach her full potential. / There have been opportunities—mistakes—dodged / encounters where her hopes are raised and / I am sobbing, clutching the bathroom sink and my stomach. / She hates me.

Bees sustain // the hive by taking flight and swarm that way too: / a lone messenger, tremor, and soon the queen / is gone. Some will follow.

In the back of the closet where I keep the things I’ve given up: the smoking jacket, the cardigan, the bolo tie with its black string and its silver and turquoise clasp, the cowboy boots I bought at the spur of the moment, among those costumes and props of another life, there where I’d hidden …

I have a shovel, blueprints, and a big enough backyard. I still don’t own a pistol.