Category: Poetry

Were they tall terns? Or meant to be herons? Lined along the sill of your big bay window, the small wooden birds your hard hands carved as Christmas gifts for a dozen children,

Those were the hours, infected, we were aware of her body, the fever wringing out the cloth of her, the sheets a witness. This was a skirmish in a war of attrition

Can’t find my shoes. Forget them. Torn sheet? Forget that. The soft quilt drifts, my cast-off reading glasses tilt sideways— slippery sheet, blind glasses, orphan shoes: a stage for drunken love though I’m sober.

The truth is I will never again see the mother I know, the one always halfway through four different books, or making the light on the water perfect in her pastel landscapes.

Soft light lands and pops on your clavicles like soap bubbles. The restoration crew comes and goes like field medics

Her heart two-steps, now flesh, now metaphor, while her mind—the brain when it blushes— gently nets a halo: thought bubbles and unlit bulbs.

I liked the idea that I could make it go away  with words, but ultimately, they would find  nothing because I never wrote.

Instead, he finds the cardinal, drop of blood flitting through the leaves, dancing where the light moves a hand as it breaks here, breaks there, casts shadow against ashen bark.