Category: poetry

deep time liturgy

at peat bog

they rinsed us from you & we came to
beneath harvest of smoke & our tools

of part memory, part dream & the dead
where they slept beneath our quilts

the peat bog will not forget, so holds
a dropped awl & still-opened hand

of at least one distant ancestor
having never met

dream leaves its memory
on the raw side of hide

& we gathered foxglove
at eventide from hills that bore

its crash, folding fields
to stitch a robe for moons

to outlast where we held the flood
until it remembered us

by settling remains in the moss
of that moor

where only the listening
from here on out is left & now

the feathered chest-dweller
coughs beneath the ribbed rafters

& we wait with low hum of estuarine mud
in our mouths

where round howls
too sharp to keep where

she gathers them
& us

still holding
that flood

by ripple marks in stone
her song remembers

the weight of our collected
bones to whisper back

o water,
where did your flood
last end?

the hidden kept

care and language

I pack a spoon
in my daughter’s lunch.
Then another,
in case the first
should disappear.

Love misplaces things.
I try to preempt the loss.

When a line begins
to murmur
I swing it by the neck—
a soft animal
I mistake for a rope.

I call it poem,
but it writhes,
wants teeth,
wants blood,
won’t feed me
when the guards come.

Just stands there,
quiet and damp,
like something I’ve left
in the sun too long,

then tried to water.

Now my throat closes.
Words spin.

No one comes
with a towel,
no one checks the floor
for shards.

She may find the spoon.
Or this one beneath it—
the one I mean to hide,
a love for when
forgetting comes.

*

This poem recently appeared in the spring edition of MUSE Literary Journal.

with history trapped inside us

from the days of light and thunder

The problem in the highway days was where to begin.
Even the lions we imagined becoming went lame.
Our backs bent early, sights set on oblivion.
War was everywhere. Fathers called it peace.

Developments advanced battalion by battalion
toward the rumored end of history. The weather ecstatic.
Furniture ads relentless. Strip malls glowing
in rivering taillights. The id ran out of land.

A gas station canopy burned red against the dusk.

Mirrors closed into screens. Our drives consumed us.
Who were we to think ourselves architects?

After the getting and spending, what remained
but the shock of touch, the idea of rest?
When the desert bloomed, we misread it—
called it sudden. That was what we knew.

*

This piece recently appeared in Your Impossible Voice, Issue 34

the speed of almost seeing

a poem of reaching

a poem whose seeds were birthed on this blog over the summer, out this week in Blue Earth Review, a publication of Minnesota State University.

I am in love with Minnesota, home of Minneapolis, the occupied city bravely resisting takeover by the goon squad of a fascist regime––with love and care, courage and grace.

loose change for the shallows

toward a voice before sense

Love, try again
now with the weight of
your tomb set down.

Only air on your shoulders
this time—then water,
a constant motion.

Tonight, plant a crab in the sky,
then the archer. Notice the bull
looking back into a gazing frog.
Make them glow. The tide—dive
after these phosphorescent fish,
recklessly forgetting the rattle
of old sense, tossing it back
to these shallows, loose change
to echo your other name,
the one you knew when language
moved in shining schools between
surface and depth,
where you flashed your multitudes
through bathwater, laughing—
vessel, your eye, your mouth.

o child
the whole of you
a single sound

yes

echo map

report from a peripheral field

even in plaster
these fragments pulse
into cracked surface

where something answers
dendrite of a distant star
light
on metal shard
to flicker

paired
neurons
deciding whether to fire
or fall

apart it remembers
two hands:
one small
one trembling

a torn scrap of paper lists
three fears, stalls before
the fourth, its wall
an open synapse

during solar storms,
a choral hum
rises

two heartbeats caught
between collision,
orbit

before an empty case
where vision loosens
arriving in periphery

into the nearest
next
away

a practice of nearness

choreographies of skin and gravity

Love this like weather
that unmasks a gentle sky.

Do not name this trembling.
or hush what aches to bends her spine.

A need for collapse
can be a call to kneeling
in disguise.

What sways this cathedral of air
ringing bells at impossible altitude,
clouding windows with myths
of ascent, her scent lingers, low––

an invitation: after such dizzy heights,
what longing there is to kiss the earth,
to press mouth against cooled ash,
admit devotion.

What impossibility, to confess
this softness —this animal
obedience to soil, its churn.
How bones remember the
murmurs of earth.

Here, too, see how body mistakes
obliteration for grace, a silence
that bows but never
calls it prayer.

how a body learns

to walk around it

The break never begins with noise,
but beneath buckled paint
behind the calendar we stuck
in hopes of growing unto faith
on walls, for blessed are the
fools, drunk on anticipation
of belief.

When it went, we learned to walk
around it, tremors disguised
as ordinary time, Baldwin’s history
sitting in the room until someone
notices the uninvited guest.

No siren sounds, no one is named.
Gravities are rearranged this way.
Pisa’s tower looked just fine
at ribbon-cutting time.

How easy it is, to mistake the wreck
for aftermath, never beginning.
Survivors find the hairline crack
and make a home in the months
before the flood runs.

Blessed the believers who
never
chart the damage, who lean in to
what’s left standing, call it home.

like water, eventually

notes nearing an edge

the pressure to bear the witness asleep
at the wheel all of us far
from the valley
who becomes the river

start somewhere I meant to
listen I meant to
hear you as you left
the land I meant to record
at least your sands running out

take this—we say of the body—
the opening notes of each of us in turn
going fast act fast you have to give it
all away