Category Archives: Poetry

On the day that I only allowed myself
to listen to AM radio, I cut my hair.
Layers irreparably tangled
collapsed weightlessly.

“I’ll take care of this later.”
The words walked off
faster than I ever could,
before another change of mind.

Horrified we might
become strangers again,
I booked a flight.

With all the money
I did not earn this winter
I want to buy you a gift, something
beautiful, like when too much
alone time has me spinning in the heat,
skirt levitating.

As a lover,
one’s best work
is to unearth
the softness
in another.

Said it would take
a light so clear
to illuminate the
core and begin
shedding moss-
the first layer,
the gentle part.

In time, it happened-
as our softness coalesced,
but scraping stones against
each other, with constant
rhythm creates heat.
Neither of us quit.

Burning, we longed for moss-
its green comfort, could we find it?

Healing hid
along contours until
sedimentary surfaces
met in physical again.

Now, with no
testament carved,
just the certainty
of heat on skin,
we trace moss
and stone
to unearth light.

Have you not touched your body in so long
that you forgot the
jellyfish quality of kneecaps
and the way they freely slide?
Have you not felt in years
your thigh and shin, smoothly sealed?

The constancy across your face hides
the moist miracle of your Portobello stems.
The depth of your gaze has rendered you blind
to your very own Southern hemisphere.

I see you kneeling in the dirt of loam
picking heirloom tomatoes-
home gown,
from the neighbor’s vines.
Coalescing with earth, your
bare knees on the inside, slide.

With the sting of pavement
warming beneath us,
you and I ran from the wet sky.

We found a roof to smell its roots
when history found one another.

He broke into your mind
with a hand on your barstool,
bending the image
of that familiar green.

Budding images of bedded nights
flew around our held hands, as I read
“Free Omelet Tuesdays” and watched the taps flow,
blissfully distracted and mindfully absent,
while you heard of places unseen.

The drenched mind spoke from
somewhere exotic and not free.
You looked in an accelerated mirror,
rough like the corners of your
conscience bellowing through
lines and lines and lines of men again.

The last time you saw him,
you begged for the kind of
forgiveness that expects
nothing at all to change, or
the kind of forgiveness that
will still bring you home
beneath moonlight and traffic lights
of the city where you learned him.
You were drunk and stole his cellphone
and it was the least important
of all that he thinks you have hidden.

You once mastered understanding
what he sees, hears, thinks and acts on,
but the last time you saw him, it
nearly failed (until the morning when
he squeezed you, reminiscent of
him teaching you to find ripe kiwis.)

But in the dark, his face was empty.
There was absence in the eyes that once
begged for yours
(but yours
were out of focus
never could you focus.)
Leaning, becoming one with a concrete wall
In a hot Juney haze you finally felt it- freedom!
Sweet and lonely freedom! It is something that will not
drive across the country and let you choose every song,
or walk to the laundromat when it’s cold in Brooklyn.
It will not worship your body even when you’re putting on shoes,
or cook a grilled cheese when you’re sick in New Brunswick.
No, it will not be kept a secret.
So you left him three times and finally it feels a little real.
You left to keep on moving
to continue growing and going,
to create
the way women do,
yet on these nights
you are so still.
You sleep in beds around the corner if
somewhere strange at all.
You meet moments of deciding.
Do you disrupt time’s remedy?
Do you pick surgically at the scab?
Pry open all that you closed so tight?

Or do you let things be?
There is never any certainty
so you idle, you merely
consider how dangerous both will be.