Poems

here is a church in Barcelona
That has been under construction for a hundred years
And I wonder if it is still holy
In its incompletion

Here, in this Catholic hospital, with its crucifix
décor and daily contemplation, sparks kiss your temples
and your tongue is tied to the tunes of Mass.

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—