Mom’s Friend Roxanne
There is someone in my house who is not my mom. She looks like her. She smells a little like her. She likes the same jazz music as her. But she has it turned up too loud, and she’s naked. She dances around the foyer like leaves in the wind, and I want to show my mom this crazy woman, but I can’t f…
The Shape of You
In our year of iPhone 16, Vinny feels his phone pulsing in the back pocket of his shorts the second he squats in front of his golf ball and examines the green. He knows of the green’s subtle deception, how it appears as a simple straight shot. It won’t fool him this time. Above, heavy clouds hang…
Amos and I Unmake the World
Marin County California, Thursday October 30, 2025
Dear Amos,
How do I hear your familiar, faraway music even still? You have percolated through the minutiae of my everyday mind so that I turn away from the immediate…but toward what, exactly?
Leaning against a live oak her…
Aubade for Boys Leaving The Knockdown Center for an Afters
You shouldn’t worry baby boy lips still hours away from shame or consequence You say you’re a grown-up now and you can want whatever you want and if you want this swallow him within your slipping minutes when the auto park just beyond these fortress walls sits quietly in repose its steel skeletons…
Waking In the Night Thinking of Having Kids
Ignorance remains the steadiest path to mistakes/errors “hey I didn’t know” is slightly superior to “I was drunk”, or that chestnut, “it was a long time ago, things were different then”. Don’t fall for it. To hit your kids is as wrong in 1970 as it is today, as wrong as princes in the tower or cig…
Ladderman
Welcome back. Kind blue light flushed the grey rags of morning. Strong, purposive light. Not a marketing tip, no service message. A customer reach, wedded to the a.m.
He examined his legs, slantways on the dull sheet. Essential to business, their definition assuring. He gripped the…
The Bitter End
Alice felt brackish being back in the city. She was seasick from the stinking, lumbering bus from Boston and standing in the throat of Port Authority. That and everything: the three hundred level philosophy and psychology classes;…
Skull Room
don’t remember being scared there in the skull room where i went to look for watering can feed flowers on grandfather’s grave there in the skull room where wooden cubbies cob-webbed held single skulls along wall vaulting fifteen-feet high in wet alcove side a centuries-old church top a steep hill…
Imperative Mood
Listen. Sit down. Have a glass of water. Okay? Good. Now lean back and remember how you got here. Don’t speak, just think. Go ahead, drink, wet your whistle. No need to look sullen. More ice? Here’s a towel. Wipe your hands and clean the grime off. Does it cling to your skin, even now? Remember…
Vietnamese Love Isn’t Loud
The first thing you need to know about me is that I’m Vietnamese and in my house, love was never loud. It didn’t echo down hallways. It didn’t sound like “I’m proud of you.” It didn’t look like hugs before school. It sounded like oil popping in a pan at five in the morning. It smelled like garli…
Knowing, Not Not-Knowing
There are no instructions for the slow, seismic shift of growing up between languages, only the gradual ache of realizing you are a creature of halves, a face that answers to two names while the mirror offers back a sentence forever cut short.
You moult and shift, a flicker passing through the…
They Don’t Bury You In Gowns Like These
I’m in a long, bright white tunnel, I pretend I’m not in a coffin. A prince whispers in my ear; no, it’s actually Prince – These paper shorts feel scratchy and the way they are slightly twisted off-center makes me glad they are temporary. Isn’t everything temporary? Let’s go crazy. Hold still – as…
The last day of her life
When Sophie sits on her sofa on March 6, 2017, she considers ending her life.
It’s not yet spring in New York City—no flowers or leaves on the trees—but it feels as if everything is ready to bloom after long months of winter stillness. Spring is her favorite season, and…
The tricolored blackbird as environmental subject/object/subject in an ecopoetic fiction
The tricolored blackbird is a native of California, and reputedly the inspiration for the electronic sounds of R2D2, for which it received no credit, no benefits, no compensation: it is an officially threatened species. A feather from the epaulet can be used in divination. The blackbird is a tr…
Widow
*On August 9th 1914, British troops departed to Germany for WWI. By the end of the barbaric war, 3-4 million women were estimated to have been widowed. Baby August has told her first untruth. Buds bloom no more to meet a genial world. The widow seizes all the pendant flowers with which she sough…
fireflies
friday night we slid into creation as if nothing could touch us catching fireflies, we smashed palms leaving luminescent smears on sweaty brows diving into tide pools, salt stinging our knees, we were still laughing when the water shifted and there they were— history’s ghosts: crushed skulls…
Kansas Summer, Airplane Hangar, 1990
Those were the longest nights of summer— the small-town airplane hanger used only for two-props spraying poison over corn and wheat and us until November. A new pilot, eighteen-year-old learner’s permit, he sailed endless Kansas sky, much farther than the fields barren of timber: unclouded eyes a…
Codas
Mary and Mary and Salome encountered a young man who told them he was alive but they were scared and didn’t tell anyone. Or they came and told Peter and the rest of us. Or maybe he appeared only to Mary Magdalene, still smelling of sweet perfume and she came and told all of us as we were mourning…
Up Daffodil Hills
A golden shovel from Emily Dickinson’s “A lane of Yellow led the eye” April called me to Ball Ground, Georgia on A day born delicate for daffodils. Two lane heartstrings, a mid-spring splendor state of mind. Spaciously alone, I curve Yellow Creek Road toward Gibbs Gardens, then led by footpath th…
Ladderman
Welcome back. Kind blue light flushed the grey rags of morning. Strong, purposive light. Not a marketing tip, no service message. A customer reach, wedded to the a.m.
He examined his legs, slantways on the dull sheet. Essential to business, their definition assuring. He gripped the…
LIBERTY
The second to last time Ellis saw Kat was as unexpected as the last.
The night was like any other in his young life. Having spent much of his middle school years the gangly odd one out, Ellis was late to the game and already beginning to feel hopeless having only just turned 18. Ellis had…
Daycare in the Closet
I search for light in the eye in her that put me away. Though, I do not understand why you lock me in the padded closet, keep me from the sky— Heat from the static tv, a breathing bane. I search for light in the eye. A Blue Bear, Purple Pegasus, and Hanging Jackets I personify. The repeating of…
House of Men, House of Women
He was a boy and he lived in a house of men, or the house of boys, as his grandmother called it. He was transported between the two houses, his dad’s father’s house and his mom’s mother’s house because he wasn’t old enough to ride his bike to and from yet.
His grandpa “Pop” was Tom, and he taug…
Unwanted Text Messages
Mr. John, I would like to have a golf date with you Hi, I’m Janna I am looking for the other half of my life I am 36 years old and single. I like polite men If you are very similar to me, please leave me a WhatsApp message now Hello, I apologize for bothering are you looking for a job? Let’s…
The Treachery of Rhyme
“Poetry is a survival.” –Paul Valéry “Poetry is a pipe.” — Paul Éluard and André Breton “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.” — René Magritte Poetry is a pipe and not a pipe Poetry is music or perhaps a polar bear This is not a poem about a polar bear It is a poem about a poem and the bear too is…
Magnolia Street
Tiny one bedroom flat space heater-warmed with a phone booth closet that could store meat – a kitchen with southern view of tattooed John and Rose’s porch from where he’d flick his Camel butts into the seven clumps of withered grass trying to be a yard sans noticea…
Mary’s Window
the six of us in a downpour nighttime, late March lantern remaining lit on the front steps our guide, Eric, tells us of eight or more known séances connecting to lost sons seventeen years in this home—best of your life laughs for hours in the kitchen and parlor light on your five-foot-two silhouet…
Consider the Mother’s Mother’s Child Too
I don’t understand how this happens, why this happens, why the egg doesn’t refuse to leave, stays put, digs in its invisible feet, planted deep in flesh, the mother squawking, the sound piercing, the other chickens looking on, shuffling their feet, pecking at invisible enemies, their eyes twitchin…
If My Sister Were a Painting
the colors would change with light: not as all paintings must, but as a river suddenly flush with wild jumping fish. pixie cut girl dashing around naked me shy and shocked peppermint ice cream pink cheeks She would turn mildly in a tar-crack driveway and mumble. She would take my folded poem in…
Not Even a Wrist of Flesh and Bone
The girl got him a bracelet for his right arm, already holding twelve bangles of silver and of gold. He never wore it, said, instead, each circle had to come to him by chance: the Middle Eastern deli counter man who’d given him the middle one, the New York psychic—grabbed his arm and told him t…
Concrete Angel
Growing up a concrete angel, strapped to the ground in cheap suspenders pleasant to a mother’s eyes, how could I not be terrified that they would snap one day? Hurling me from this world to the next, where suddenly I’m arrested for abusing clouds, giving heaven it’s first black eye. This little…
Engorged
Tart orange juice dribbles down, it slips between my open lips searching for a place to rest between coffee and toothpaste. Such cursive undulation of damp drops are impeded by a sleeve, where wandering thought of prosciutto forms its nest. Mellifluous screams / defiant jazz tickles ear folds wi…
The Coldest Continent
It’s sunny at the end of the world. Maude wants to tell someone, but she has no one to tell. The sentence ticks through her mind as she settles into one of the many empty chairs in the cruise ship’s glass-walled library, surrounded on all sides by the roll of forty-foot waves. Yesterday, she stood…
Can We Stop?
“Can we just stop at the store? Please?”
My client, Tina, said this while we idled at a stoplight. She had just opened her purse and discovered an empty, crumpled cigarette pack. She held it out to…
Strange Birds
After months of confusing applications and automated interviews an offer finally came in. They were a small, nonprofit team working off grant funding to study how wildlife adapted to climate change in urban environments. They needed someone to transcribe a year and half worth of field…
The Long Walk Up
I left the family farmhouse with shovel in hand and walked the two miles to the graveyard. I began digging and was stopped only by chance, the parish priest having noticed me while he walked the few steps between the rectory and the church. He asked what I was doing. “My grandfather’s trapped. I h…
Smoke
Even the night is like day. Revelation. Crickets scratch greasy strings. Hide and seek in leaves spotted by a rot within as if the North Star had any say down here. Polaris freezes light in vision like ice crystals in windows some too wintry morning. Alter ego to the coloration in a tobacco field…
Moonlit
This is the life I wanted all that time, the one that held itself away from me while I kept choosing lovely cups and creatures, circus-like and therefore real in all their shining. A man at the meeting says at least today I’m not doing anything that’s killing me – I think, apart from living –…
Greenland
I thank God for this most amazing day, for the leaping greenly spirits of trees, and for the blue dream of sky and for everything which is natural, which is infinite, which is yes. E.E. Cummings
I view the ripe rind of the ice-capped isle from the foreign deck, silent, bleak peaks…
At night, I dream I’m a bird in a room.
The room is yours, like the house, like the sun, like the man you want me to call Papa. There are hands. His. Yours. Hands that push and sting and choke my body. My body, also yours. There’s a mouth. I flinch when it calls my name. Everything is so ugly in the mouth, especially me. It’s all for…
Cherry
“Come here.”
She had a perfect, late-summer cherry between her teeth and when she broke its skin an impossible red ran over her tongue, between the seam of her lips. She spat out the core and the fruit along with it, looking like some boxer on television who’d just been punched in t…
Alamo
A shack where a house once stood Shingles that hang on by a thread This was once a home Built by muscled men Carefully crafted to withstand anything Except time A porch where many once sat Is now a stiff wind from extinction Rusted rockers turned from green to brown A screen door shredded From…
Winding Inward: Prayer
-after the image by Paola Corso
If you are to move at all, stay still, allow nothing but breath to step down and around the self, syllables that don’t need connections to words descending spirals of stairs on their own accord. If you are t…
The Coldest Continent
It’s sunny at the end of the world. Maude wants to tell someone, but she has no one to tell. The sentence ticks through her mind as she settles into one of the many empty chairs in the cruise ship’s glass-walled library, surrounded on all sides by the roll of forty-foot waves. Yesterday, she stood…
The Long Walk Up
I left the family farmhouse with shovel in hand and walked the two miles to the graveyard. I began digging and was stopped only by chance, the parish priest having noticed me while he walked the few steps between the rectory and the church. He asked what I was doing. “My grandfather’s trapped. I h…
