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.

this face
that cannot
imagine the sweetness
of reciprocity, begs
for release.

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)

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 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.

(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
               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

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.

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

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

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.

Madeline loves it
And sits as Mother would.
The priest like her Father
Dressed all in grey,

Palms fluttering with
Paper clowns

black on black on Black on
Timbs;
an interruption – no,
an intervention.
a reminder to the Columbus-ing ass fuckboys
(and girls) that
they
still

“To defend our beloved Cuba.” The closing line of this poem from the great Chilean communist and surrealist writer Pablo Neruda rather sums up how working and oppressed people – in Latin America and around the world – are feeling in the wake of Fidel Castro's death. There is a lot to say about Castro the man, but it is far less important than the Cuban Revolution he helped lead, build and maintain for more than fifty years against the outside pressures of American empire.

Written she lapsed my eyelids curse
Never subjugated to her thoughts worse
Dreaming of twinkled themes her subconscious works
Works night and day because her lips she tamed
Her words released could leave bodies slain
Quiet in spite of riveting details
Still her mouth only inhales
Their thoughts she thunk perhaps prematurely

The flags snap in the wind, the whispered breath
that steals the words and whickers, horse and knight.
The fires mutter and crack in dying light
and breaths from noses mist, steal proof from death.

And here am I, rose up from lowly whore,
shown faces smashed by hooves, shown strength in spades.

we've charted the flaming arch
of nitroglycerine stars
dreams that explode against reality
seen dragons emerge from clouds of tear gas
and men in shades of midnight run away
the Street muscle down skyscrapers
in cities perspiring chaos

I came upon a stinking field of muck
and saw, within its depths, a golden cup.
Nothing for it. I hitched my trousers up
and waded in, heartsick when my feet stuck.

It took three hours for me to pull them out.
By then I'd learned to coast upon the slime.