In the plague days there will be sun / and wind blowing clouds across, not enough rain / to fill the reservoir up, and bright yellow flowers: / spindling dandelions, saffron ultraviolet / reaching for the daylight, and closed tight at dusk, / against fascism.
Read moreCorona Requiem + Other Poems
From all angers, pulses confidential / on the monitors, and all the beeps, / pray to die within your blessed sleep, / all the bread and oranges essential
Read moreGentrification Is Coming + There Will Be Cupcakes
A point of convergence / Collision of the fluid kind / Turbulent / Where reflection is muddled / And the spirit murky / These are all questions.
Read moreWater found on distant planet
Water found on distant planet. / I want to go there. / Free of embarrassment, none that I know there.
Read moreGhazals for Jim Foley: Two Poems
The vanishing point where your bodies appear, / A desert horizon where nothing but light comes / Into being. I sit with two letters, one from a / Journalist and another from a soldier, overcome
Read moreFlog Hill: Four Poems
When I was a kid I made a pocket in my head / and held the family dog inside for a whole week / before dad realized he hadn’t run away. / Dad made me bring Hero back but he was older / and he said I was his favorite, now.
Read moreChow Mein + Anti-Ode
Please step aside for a moment, ma’am. / A strike at my bare feet. / someone else exits the coffin, and / they go on and I am here. I have / no bomb but I wish I had / something to mop the blood with.
Read moreBorradores
These illuminated poems appeared in Red Wedge #6, “In Defense of Transgression.”
Read moreThe People's Vote + Notre Dame
Let it have no known leader, the campaign. / Let it be led by cool fresh water, clearer and sweeter, / f ollow the ringing out, we, across the tunnel walls to light, / backs straightened, blinking in the rain.
Read moreWages for Housework and Other Necessary Labor
The Eclipse (El Eclipse) by Lola Alvarez Bravo.
this face
that cannot
imagine the sweetness
of reciprocity, begs
for release.
Sword Swallower (somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic)
Sol Niger by Leonora Carrington, 1975.
I spent a year as a sword swallower
Moaned your name through the scar tissue
Closed my eyes and imagined the crows
Feet that form around your eyes when you
Smile (Achilles heel turned broken ankle).
I wanted you to tell me more about G*****
(You were impressed that I could find it on a map)
Old Year Poems
Marc Chagall’s Obsession, 1943.
I'd like to take a silver spoon and pith
out all the bits that hurt. My Jewish blood
the same as yours, no matter who you're with,
old velvet curtains bunched up in the mud,
the artworks cut from frames, rolled up and sold
off to new homes. And loving ones.
Where is God?
Kathleen Gilje, “Susanna and the Elders, Restored - X-Ray,” 1998.
Where is God on the testimony floor?
Outside, in marble hallways. In the shoes
slipped on, behind the shouting on the news,
and in the voice of Christine Blasey Ford.
Most Things Die In the Winter Here: 3 Poems
(in dreams)
my teeth fall out.
I am a mouth full
of crowns and empty
houses; my gums, bloody
shores where ancestral trauma still washes up
today.
I Would Like + The Bolshevik
Untitled by Ilya Kabakov.
I would like
to be born
in all countries,
to lack a passport
to the panic of the poor Foreign Ministry,
to be with all the fish
in all the oceans
Dreaming of a Hundred Years Ago: Three Sonnets
Konstantin Novakov's Where are my Seventeen? in St. Petersburg (photo by Martha Cooper).
Some things, once said, can't ever be unsaid.
Some spells, once chanted, cannot be unmade,
but spark, leap over silicon barricades,
cast afterimages of brilliant red.
The spell creates the wizard. There lies he,
babe rocked by engines, watched through robot eyes,
his cradle hung from cables to the sky,
lulled fast asleep by steam trains to the sea.
2046: Five Poems
Detail from Craig E. Ross' The Resurrected Ghosts of Dead Labor.
a cap of night
cold and icy swept by tangles of wire
and rickets
the unsettled courses the many empty hands
of the workers leaving empty factories
forever
Lights Bleed Red: Six Poems
Revenge (13 Baristas) by Adam Turl
Barred temptations is how secrets begin
Erratic desires to seize his prize
Pushes him to conspire from within
Now, a friend, and admired in her eyes
Slyly he fills the post of absent love
Easily ‘cause Absentee was ten years
Trump Supermoon: Three Sonnets and an Introduction
I write formal poems because I'm a little weird in the brain, somewhere off the median on the neurodivergence spectrum. A formal poem is a place where I can express or test ideas or feelings or aesthetics without the profound exposure of a public article. Usually what happens when I write a sonnet is a phrase will occur to me that echoes in that meter and I will think about it. Sometimes that phrase is within the first line, and sometimes it is buried deep within the poem. Each of my poems has started with such a seed, uttered by a friend or within my own thoughts.
Somehow in poems or in any sort of art some parts of society find it acceptable to express feelings or beliefs that one cannot express elsewhere. And that is what I do in my poems.
Read moreSunday School / Slapped
Lee Krasner's The Seasons
Madeline loves it
And sits as Mother would.
The priest like her Father
Dressed all in grey,
Palms fluttering with
Paper clowns