A FEW POEMS

PUTTING OUT

She puts out a hummingbird feeder,
plastic and red, scarlet-high, up
outside her sixth floor window,
floating, wired on a
suction cup over streets
filled with people and cars
and half-filled trashcans.
But what she gets are crows. Three
scruffy crows of dull black wings on
the granite ledge below. She calls them
ravens, peeling pink-tinged transparent
wrap from a lump of bread, three
raisins, a cube of cheese she slivers.
The tip of a wing shushed against the pane,
delicate and wild. An abandonment to
desire. No complaints. No whining.
It beats into the air. Angles.
Folds against its body. Settles.
She leans her rouged cheek
into the glass, her fragile capillaries
anticipating the return of
the heat that is family.

Published Puckerbrush Review; Port City Poems (anthology)

FROM THIS SEPTEMBER DAY

All war, under law, will from this September day
on a dirt road in northern Maine where
Albertine Cyr flies her French mourning hands
into the night, often into the day, be conducted by women.
The sucklers will choose where to place the charge,
whose child to take, and what reason is good enough to send
Otto Schroeder’s daughter, Muzah Bozieh’s brother,
Albertine’s youngest son into the fire.
She enters the room where her Freddie slept,
palms the feathered pillow’s sack, the one
that rubbed his night cheeks.
Experienced witness to vulnerability,
spooner and changer, cradler of whole bodies,
her big heart swells in the cramped air
of this dark curled into its own cell.
Cap on the dresser. Church shoes by the bed.
Red fishing jacket on the doorknob.
She bruises a war cry from her tongue to slash
bayonet, napalm, missile from her vocabulary,
and smoke shadow-writing up from the merciless
shine of bones onto the moony walls: blood, Earth,
broken hearts, supple hands, hunger, a milky mother,
hope, and open-mouthed bass in the morning.

Published Café Review & The Other Side of Sorrow, anthology

ISOLATION ASSIGNMENT

My hungers are small. Often nothing.
Sometimes everything. It’s you
who could feed me—your words, your
face, your last days of skin and bones
in a sloppy white t-shirt, the dust of your
footsteps. You said I’m intended to
make a new life,
somewhere with someone,
welcome words tripping off a new tongue
from a new mouth
lighting up a new face. Even as I go on
to imagine slump of skin, stumble
of snore in the blind night, bodies run mad,
how, I must ask, does the face
[with the mouth and the tongue,
the words and all the rest] find its way
through this thistle of virus, your iridescence
still shimmering on the emptied plate?

Published Wait: Poems from the Pandemic (anthology)

MAPPING

Do not be misled by tiny
broken bones that look
incapable of holding a teacup
from your mother’s old set of
china or a matchstick,
the pretense of privacy,
luminarias, buckets of discarded
wings, a bruised cloud split
open, swollen seeds, an altar of
dust, shadow driveways and
chain-link fences, a dump filled
with broken plates, greasy paper
towels, shattered Styrofoam.
Do not be misled by roads with a
stoplight and a chalky white stripe,
an arrow pointing right or left, front
or back, any arrow pointing anywhere,
anyone or anything trying to tell
you how or where or when.
Do not be misled by instructions/the
past/plans. Do not be misled by fear.

Published Plague Papers (journal)

SHUTTERING MY BOY

The shutter catches the reedy boy and his size 44 pants dancing
around his hips, the click of metallic and plastic,
synchronization familiar in my ear, under my finger.
But after he is gone, really gone, and I have processed
all the old rolls of film, every one, I cannot find him and
his pants, the belt and the way the sun leaked through the window,
spilling onto one shoulder, like butter on the cast iron black of his T-shirt.
Up under my breastbone where the acid now lodges some mid-
nights, I carry all the other non-photos:
his slouch…
his barely brushed teeth…
his fingers resting on the rim of the crystal goblet he told me 
he wanted when I died—I don’t know what to do with it now…
his singing, low in his throat…
his bony knees bent under his chest in sleep while the snow falls
onto the world beyond: layers of water and silt and rock: nothing I can do
will hurry him or promise me I can reach through the window…
his words flying up, out of his mouth, telling stories (of cars and
baseball and ocean in the early morning)…
his hand loose on my sweatered shoulder, his heart
beating against my back…
his hip slung out to the side, fragile in the cracked light, denying
he had stolen the five watches, all the while eying
the raspberry Danish with its red-seeded center on the kitchen table.

Published Diner Poetry Journal—Diner Prize (judged by Maine poet laureate Betsy Sholl)

A SOLDIER’S DICTIONARY: THE LETTER S

Silence and stillness: a colander
through which to sift
flailing arms, an inconspicuous heart,
unspent tears, one bare foot, 
a boy’s left hand placing
the bucket in the shade of the willow
beside the open door, the rope
slapping his brown thigh, the curve
of his small back bent over the Euphrates
scooping water, sweet figs and licorice,
tousled black hair, slight morning breath,
a dreamy smile—the rewind
of a last day when the spun light
dusted bullets across the road.

Published Consequence (journal)

BODY SPEAK

The drive to live :: today in the present :: a new combustion
:: lens :: viewpoint filtered through a rough draft of a life.
Interludes or interstices of what I used to call time before
you moved into another space of disembodied particulars.
An ether of soft flame, a smoke of time capsule.

You off to the incinerator. Me on the bus home to receive the box of you from the U.S. Postal Service, the deliverer of the dead. I held onto my mother for decades, my son for a year, and you only long enough for the arrival of the glitter of sunlight on the Penobscot after the day of the walkup gallery with the scissored paper boxes made of washi or tengu, maybe kozo or ogura, cascading from the ceiling :: voices a version of an echo around the corner :: laughter :: speckled phrases of beautiful, sometimes unusual, words 

I drive off into the blinded rain and the impossible full-sky, top-to-bottom, ridge-to-ridge rainbow :: bridge of colors :: violet, indigo, flickering russet flitting in the breeze. 

I’m newly tired. And so perhaps. But not. Such clarity. Despite.

Under my tongue, a sequin of rain pools now each night, harvesting what most people think must be the specter of heartbreak or heartloss, heartache, something heart-indefinable-but-painful in body speak but body speak is no longer my chosen language: heart, not the organ or the metaphor, only the container… of all this presence.

On tomorrow’s today, rising before sunbreak, at the top of some random perfumed bluff, I’ll pick silk threads and crimson flowers, fresh bread, lavender and cod, feel your lips moist on my right shoulder.

Published Scavengers Journal

LAST MOMENTS LAST

I am the leaf you plucked from that roadside plant,
the name you labored over, your mouth
trying to shape its fleshy spine into a word,
a song—a note sweetening your tongue.
I am your thumbprint on the leaf’s underside
and the paper plate you laid it on.
The knife, the fork, the crumpled paper towel
masquerading as a napkin.
I am the whole picnic, every movement
of eyelid and brow, the licking of your lips,
your legs racing the fence line and the cows
mooing on the other side, your heart thumping
about on the inside of your T-shirt, happy
to be alive, in love, unaware how swiftly
and unannounced death can come, how
the innocent can be plucked from its own story.

Published Poems from Here, Maine Public

CACHEXIA OF TIME

His heart punched me. Now, not just the random heart strokes that everyone else is talking about or was talking about yesterday but the infinitesimal strokes that are what I most held onto after his last breath. I cannot begin to tell you the last breath—deep gutted scent of what couldn’t be eaten. He so wanted that smoothie he asked the kitchen staff to remake in the last morning, and he would save—scent of nutmeg and ginger—the bite of heartache in every breath. He lingered and scooped, his slawed fingers, the slight shred and sift of possibility.

I am choking on dreams—it started that night after the night after I laid my left ear—the one of the three earrings, now only undressed holes—against the insidious pulse of his throat, rings of piano notes throbbing up through his slack lips, cracked lips of departure, my lips sewn into his.

Who would have thought he could leave that way, so much accumulated in the cycle of unfathomable gusts.

So just listen, and you will begin to hear the scent of cashews, and okra, blessed moments of peppermint and unguents. His skin unblemished and raw, how could I have seen all of that and known that love was expansive beyond the moment, beyond the planet, beyond the crunch of bone and unfatted fat. That is when I understood, my fingers on the deep, winded flesh of his cheek.

Published Solstice Literary Journal/ Finalist Stephen Dunn Poetry Prize

SKINN(MM)ING IN SEVEN CYCLES

Our waters have all gone on a walk-about. Not of their own volition. Like a stroll. No intention here. What else could they do? We’ve been punching holes in the skin of this rudderless boat since we first formed a fist, made the tool, sharpened the tip. So, just listen up. Before we drown. Or maybe end up starting over, in the beginning when breath and sound and the jazz licks of Anat Cohen, Kamau, Matthew Whittaker (he’s barely started, but fabulous, fragile and fierce, give him a fucking chance, really) are ferreted away into the future of now when mountains of trash and megabillions of gallons of fuel have spewed us into the behind-times. Before keyboards and clarinets, before dancing, before bodies. Pre-Ardipithecus. Again.

Once there were rosehips—well, not once, but now, but it could be once, like gone—cragging the duned hip to the sea, a rowboat, scent of perfume, you and me and that sister of yours with the snaky shoulders backed up against the doorframe, breath unchafed, unloosed, stripped clean. Clean. Yes, clean. I’ll take clean. Just please not gone. Some words have razor teeth, “perishable brevity” written across the landscape of piping plover, saltmarsh sparrow, roseate tern, fourteen-year-old deaf dachshund in the backyard, vixen on the path, grandson kicking the mud-stained soccer ball, even those blasted earthworms routing up the boreals, crafting graves of leaf litter for you and me, the grands and the ungrands. So many, too many. Racing into and through/ over the leaf/leave/left/leavened mounds of our future.

Lucky us. Wildness. Silence. Natural beauty. Maple and birch, ash, aspen, beech, cherry, oak, willow, cedar. Coastline, miles, many miles, many more miles of coastline. Lubec’s and Stonington’s, all of it, crashing and splashing, but heating up ninety-nine percent faster than Nanking’s or San Diego’s or Watamu’s. Our heavenly world swelling (the warmer the water, the more it expands). In twenty-nine years, sea level will have risen six inches (or two feet!), chewed up the coast, and my grandchildren (the one of the soccer ball and the now-eight-year-old who would spend every day cooking and painting and talking, all of it brilliantly) will be thirty-nine and thirty-seven. 

“Desperate in our grief” is what I started to insert into this story of our evolution, here, now (the eight Arctic nations—United States, Russia, Canada, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland—are silently rushing off … ruthless … unsettled … asleep at the glacial wheel), but I will not label me or them or you, us, with desperation or grief, fear, denial, resistance. We can make mistakes then. My organic ice-dream-lickers (now ten and eight) will carry other words in their surprising minds.

Our waters have all gone on a walk-about. Not of their own volition. Like a stroll. No intention here. We made it. We fix it. So, just listen up. We don’t have to drown. Or end up starting over, in the beginning when breath and sound and the jazz licks of Anat Cohen, Kamau, Matthew Whittaker (he’s barely started, but fabulous, fragile and fierce, and, come on, we can give him a fucking chance) didn’t exist, or roads and paintings, museums, movies, ocean liners.

I am not a doom talker. I’m a dancer and laugher and hard worker, a saver, a lover, naked and sincere. I’m a listener. I hear larvae and bubbles, rain splatting on the cracked asphalt, tree rings, coral reefs, the glitter of light in the night, gases and carbons and data-body-data, sedimentary rock layers, wind folding millions of minute adaptations, the puncture of seeds, disease, dis-ease, the rumble of the refrigerator, four hundred and thirteen billion tons of disappeared ice inching up the sea.

Oh, we humans, we humans, we humans. Arrogance and heart. Alive to chance. Alive. Still alive

Published A Dangerous New World (anthology)

PHOTO CREDIT: Annaliese Jakimides