The boats string along the seam
of green and blue waters,
white mites on a fish vein,
trailing thin proboscides
that must be bitten to succeed.

He lived a long life—a normal span of /
9 to 5 and bright eviction notices on front doors. /
He would tell his wife every night before bed, /
“I will wake up tomorrow and do better.”

Days like blossoms
Some, green buds
Reluctant to push away
The wooden bed frame
On which they rest

The doves find a spot
Of shade under a bench
And sit together, quietly
Speaking about the world
Of people and rain.

this poem is the story of us/
written
between two pieces of paper/
he talked about us as though
he is not one amongst us/
as far
as i’m telling the story, the talk is
about us, ie, you and me and him/

of mass shootings and love and chopsticks and bridges and warmth and cherry blossoms and expectations and acrostic poems and
m Maybe it’s naïve for me to expect the world to scream
a and shoot just because another human is shot.
s Silence is not the absence of a gunshot.
s Silence is the presence of a bulletstorm.

She walks in, seventeen and agate-pale,
to view the Difference Engine No. 1
with her maman—blue taffeta, white veil,
herself a fearsome intellect and bastion
of social justice. Great gold instrument,
steam engine structure and pipe organ height,
exquisitely bewitching. Ada, intent
on further knowledge,

My hair is wet and drips. Water collects
breeze-chilled
in the small of my back.

The time is half-past
bittersweet. The day ends simply
and begins. Exhausted, refreshed,

Mostly brown fields salted with white patches of snow—
moist from winter’s thaw and the coming green of spring.
It’s there in the going and coming of seasons, the earth
swallows your fading white form as you walk away.
I follow to the blue horizon wishing you would not depart.

I hate shaving.
Thinking enlists in its war.
The two dimensions of reflection
summarize me.
Foam licks my temporal chin,
I confess to the razor how
I’m leaving immortality behind
for someone else to believe in like a dolt.

I walked through the walls of the Louvre
and noticed the Hall of Sculptures was still
asleep. I tiptoed in and took a deep breath.
As I exhaled slowly, a springtime breeze,
Winged Victory of Samothrace shook
out her wings. Her marble gown,

“You came here and took the jobs our fathers built for us.”
We exploit our talents in the fertile fields, in the
shadows of portable toilets, in asparagus rows retching,
wrapping ripped rags around numb fingers for
a nightshift at the Blue Smoke Slaughterhouse.

We want fires that burn. Poems that hurt. Words that are so painstakingly blunt they break
barriers. People that are so honest it brings others to their knees.
Eventually, they will beg and they will plead. “Please end your statement with a period and not
a dagger.”

The painted buntings used to pair among
the fractured feelings
neither bunting nor feeling,
came to assist their harvest
what was settled among the field, a Hairy bear (one that laughed)
slinked in from the wilderness

Three boys, bare-backed, draped elbows
over a life raft. It was a spring mid-day.
A fourth propelled himself into the air
drew up his knees to his chest
and cracked the surface, causing his friends
to shake their heads and dab at their eyes.

I wish you would take the time you need.
Enter and enter again until clarity comes
and you leave with all the answers.
We talk of the weather to avoid talk
of the things that matter,

What’s New, What’s Left

I keep stray hairs, those
golden lines
pulled by comb and air

before you question my
disease, my
battle and bait that I cannot shed.

If This is Love
you love me
like a getaway car/an extra foot of rope/the single phone call/a life
jacket/what i mean
is/you love the way that i am/always ready to save you/that
i will get my hands dirty               knees
bloodied        
everything bruised/so you don’t have too/i don’t ask what you are willing to do for
me

3^rd Floor Up

The days started
getting slower and faster simultaneously.
And I lost interest.
But at the same time,
they raced and I couldn’t see them pass.

Landscape

You can’t trust what you see
in the mottled blue and violet
around a black eye.
Real monsters are the ones
we don’t recognize at first.

Brotherly Love

We start out soft as Egyptian sheets – boys,
then we manufacture into men. Notice how the word
men, sounds harder, stiffened by our insides churning
to stone as we grow.

Failed her

I failed
her. Was not
good enough because
no one can ever be
good enough to carry
the burdens of the
dying on their backs, to
be blessed with the
baggage of existential
emotion that makes life so
sweet as to make it unbearable

Yo-Yo

Epic refereed over-the-moon contests
were sponsored by Duncan Toys Inc
outside the best local movie theater
where we saw twenty-five cartoons
for a quarter. Plus the raffle winner
with the luckiest ticket got to bring
a box of chocolates home to mother.

The Luminous Mysteries

For the better part of an hour, I sit
in an examination room, my nose
dripping onto the butcher paper,
having feigned interest in the fake
breast handed to me by a doctor
at this urgent care.