Beachcombing

We throw life away,
sand dollars plump and green as unripe plums
the conk shell with the conk still in it. Bent

beneath sun bristling as an urchin,
we scout for skeletons. Heaps of fingerbones,
the final clutch of coral, and the husks

of conks cluttering this no-man’s sand.
Somewhere in the jungle on the island
across the water, vibrant blossoms are dropping

under slates of rain plating the mountain’s
cloud-corroded crown. Nature’s poetics
balk at immortality.

She hurls the creatures of the sea against
the shore until they shatter.
Her genocides are everywhere you look.



2017

Drop

Penned in by synths, a proto-prophet echoes
the ghosts of future past. Everyone cheers,
their limbs jerked by the strings she sings, as shadows
bow to the strobe’s sublimity.  The floors
so hot we just can’t keep our feet off them
are slick with piss and beer. A drunken boy
crouched by the speakers, in donation bin
attire, puts a hand out for more liquor
and everyone cheers. Nips and forties appear
and time starts skipping in a syncopation.
What falls away is always and is near
someone remarks, and like a confirmation
the speaker falls on the boy. Everyone cheers.
The music keeps pulsing, pouring out of his ears.

One good tern deserves another

Let us go then you and I, and fly
bipolar partners. Woe to wheel alone
into the darkness of the midday sky!
But match your wing-beat to my heartbeat, bone
to hollow bone. And from the breeding grounds,
so long to Cote d’Ivoire and Carcassonne
and Santa Catarina. Rushing sounds
are all we know of place now, and our home
is neither here nor there nor in between
your wing-bones, skipping over seas like stones.
Embodied trajectories, retrace the been
in is, scavengers rooting air for boon,
silver needles backstitching where we’ve flown
binding the ocean to the migrant moon.

2017

Depressions

There is a dimpling principle, as seen
in swallets slowly disemboweling glaciers
in cancellous bone and in tafoni craters
in scoliosis rippling through the spine
which bruises fruit and bows the washing line
a depression that can alter precious borders
when a surface or a tension there surrenders
introducing a nuance to design
the brutish precepts “bend” and “break” cannot
the principle that cups the Moon and Earth
in the trampoline-like fabric of time and space
which brings us round to settle for our lot
and makes a child’s skull vulnerable after birth
and should have softened the marble of your face.

2017

Daughter

My nightmares are of him, the wrathful father
I used to fear I’d grow to be like him
A petty, ugly, bulging vein of anger
My nightmares were I’d be a wrathful daughter
but it is him, all him, and I am gentle
I grow more gentle and he grows more dim
My nightmares were of him, the wrathful father
I used to fear I’d grow to be like him.
2015

The Hourglass

The hourglass that bulges at the middle
      I seem to see it everywhere I go
                                      the last bite of an apple will reveal it
                                    two cones, a sphere, a lozenge or a bow
                                      And cutting figures into railroad board
                                      to make Glengarry caps for kids to wear
                                    next week at Scottish Fest, my scissors snip
                                  and in the scraps that fall, the shape is there.
                                    At dinner with a group I don’t know well
                                      I clench my paper napkin and I twist
                                          it anxiously beneath the tabletop
                                      and after, find the hourglass in my fist.
                                What’s in the middle part that makes it bulge,
                                        my refuse swelling with significance?
                            Which I would loose, my hoarding thoughts intake:
                                  a pregnant glass whose water will not break.

2015

Villanelle

I'm not sure how I am supposed to help her.
Does “doing nothing” mean the same as “kill”?
How should I know? Am I my sister's keeper?

I left for school and now I rarely see her.
I’m still the only one she trusts to tell.
I’m not sure how I am supposed to help her.

If she sinks into medicated slumber,
am I at fault in every bitter pill?
How should I know? Am I my sister’s keeper?

I'm not a mother, therapist or doctor;
I don't know how to make a person well.
I’m not sure how I am supposed to help her.

I couldn't save Jess from the ER either,
I didn't even know that she was ill.
But knowing now, am I my sister’s keeper?

What if Cain didn’t raise his hand to murder
but quietly stood and watched as Abel fell?
I’m not sure how I am supposed to help her.
How should I know? Am I my sister’s keeper?