Poems

My eyeballs twitch to blink, they dry out before I remember, staring but not seeing,
To
Blink.

It was the hayloft’s aerial devilry— stench of rot in the heat, barn boards strewn with excrement, swallow and bat, littered with too many winged corpses for a child to revive— that compelled her

There are whispers. They call like echoes in empty space, So that we may find a semblance of shapes amongst the darkness. Only here, on the precipice of passing, are we forced with the honest truth. Like rivers, we ebb and coil and stretch far beyond the measure of our bodies.

January swallowed me
With my claws and my plans
and dreams

the last surviving member
of Heaven’s Gate
reflects on failure
I thought you were
coming back
had wrapped up
everything
was ready
to be taken away

there’s something happening that I can’t quite
catch. something hiding, birthing,
like the egg of a maggot, itching
to hatch, quite slight—
barely there—

Once again, to the shore
pebbles and plastic wrappers
in-drawing, withdrawing breath of wind,
that slow moaning of foghorns:
our common humanity washed up,
yet again.

I swerve when I hear the doctor’s words,
the news of her 26 cancerous lymph nodes
crosses the line and veers into my lane
the impact like an oncoming car