Not quite a morsel or a nugget,
not a hint or a nibble or slice or shred,
not a scrap or a snack or a grain or a crumb,
not even a hunk or a chunk or a taste or …
Poetry
Testing a Pattern / Replicas / Swim, Swam, Swum
Testing a Pattern
I’ve watched someone who needed air
pitch a loose fist through her own window.
It was the second time I watched her die.
My mouth is a window open.
I hang heavy toile curtains—a scene
of a …
The Blue Sky
The sky is not blue in all places
There are mountains, there are trees
There are no mountains, there are trees
Yet the sky here is higher
The shadows follow me
The outlines around the objects
My imagination of the …
Resentful and Ready
I find myself with a bit in my mouth from time
to time. That means that I am bearing all the weight.
That means that I am bridled and tamed. I am
certainly carrying a man— I may or …
After an Argument with my Mother
A horse
Leans into the coyote’s attack,
Presses against teeth,
Submits to claws, to
Defer the pain
of Torn flesh, of
Severance.
You, a horse,
Leave your last happiness,
Fly across the Atlantic to the father who
Pounded worthlessness …
the children
wide hemisphere of roiling and din
flung mud as a tank rolls by
soon blood will river the road
the emptying of soul in order to
kill, obey orders, kill
who we are in the shadows
across the border, arms …
I try to track my thoughts, but there’s only sensation
at a Love’s travel stop, through the portal of Love’s travel
a day’s idle moving, nothing crystallized,
mildly frictionless, and further only feeling
we’ve been at this stop before…
overlapping patterns ripple at edges
merge into that which bonds us, …
Bitter
Even after twenty years on North Chelton Road,
I never ate a plum from the tree my dad planted
in our backyard because the deer always beat me
before I could know what came from the blossoms
they nibbled on, …
History
Minor League
He’s gorgeous, his brother—looks like Jared Leto.
In front of us the Grasshoppers
making quick work of the Ashville Tourists.
A row behind, Kathy’s friend Shannon—
hotdog in hand, oversized beer between the knees—
hungry for more about my brother.…