Poem: The hard way

We cannot heal atrocity with atrocity, make recompense with broken bones. So much lost, yet snatching the remaining crumbs will not satisfy. The grass grows long and gold over unmarked graves, stones shall crack at the abandoned mausoleum. Set aflame, a house flares then crumbles, the ashes smoldering for eons with an unbearable heat. We […]

Poem: Purusha

We must speak: tumble out the words of fury for the lost and snatched, for those hunted and slain by those who chose to become monsters. You say I’m frivolous, I should make myself small and so like the mouse escape the notice of the trap. Notice me! May I give my life as music, […]

Poem: For her

The winter rain slurs sound, huddles low and gray, a brooding dove on the hills. We crouch with wet signs and shouts. A flag cracks. In these times, cleverness is a weapon. My seer’s seat empty, I am dreading the road. Not this one, with wet tires and horns blaring their trumpets like a church […]

Poem: O come, hope

O come, hope, a moth to the flame of us with our clamor and music, our chants and our shouts. As the blooms rise unexpected from the melting snow, may you rise with us and tumble forth, a wave of mighty Earth. Praxidike, you hear our petitions and rise in the spring with seeds in […]

Poem: Why do I record shit again?

The day after hangdog — could have done something productive: cleaning the grout, hand-scrubbing tile. Could have been someone you understood: movies, for instance, popcorn celebrity. (Not dulcimers.) I’m compelled to spin and sing these tunes no one listens to, everyone hates but flinches at mentioning because it’s not polite to taunt the depressive. (We’ll […]

Poem: Anti-self

Shuck your true face and join with the mask that countenance of flaming gold unlike to you, dear William. Maybe she’d love you if you were gold and foreign. You’d settle for drawing spirits who will put you on — you, a startling fancy for a lesser god. In divisions we are sundered — the […]

Poem: Antarctica

This place, man, she says from the bottom of the world. No, the very bottom, the one that sits like a flower of ice on the ass-end of the apple. The stem hangs from the polestar in eternal night but day is endless on the ass-end, filled with fog and penguins and scrapings of stone. […]

Poem: Prosperity hens

Sometimes words fail. A colorful string of hens and bells suffices. My mother says they bring good fortune hung by the door — sixteen scarcely avian triangles that clank when I turn toward the staircase. The walls, of course, are prosperity: they keep the storm out, the one that’s wailing through the oak branches. And […]

Poem: On time

O the moon-blanket fresh and cold renews the sheen of winter, the year old — fading the sparkle of the failing ray, yet dark fails, too. This to say: the lights are swinging their mighty pendulum again, pulling time like a smear, a distortion. Blue ray red fade — I forget the progression, I’m no […]

Poem: Insecure

Would I be as slender as the leaf the light stem that thread of attachment breeze-fluttered and ethereal — a scrap, a ghost, a girl. But I am stone and mud-formed, heavy as an orbiting moon swinging close enough to pull the tides. Gazelle dream, wind-runner, I would be the breath through the long grass. […]