Previously Published Poems

Vacation Ennui

for all I know these are the same silent gulls as yesterday who never suffer down time or anxiety from the horizon’s naked space or unease of an empty agenda I’m awake with nothing to do but be and try to make sense of this impossible beauty the slow stimulus of water compared to the…

As the Cease-Fire Holds

    Black has the advantage of two rooks & a bishop. When I’m losing, the best moves leave me still losing & white folds to improbable dawns. As soon as I’m leading the tenor changes. There’s analytics in the way of my sensationalism for spring. The breeze pulls itself out the window & the…

The Lady Macbeth Effect

  What I touch and what touches me needs washing if I say more than that I’ll need to stick the bar of soap in my own mouth. Lavender and the sounds of October cooling the ground outside my powder room I save my tears because there’s no one here to watch me cry. Flotsam…

As Youth Concludes

  The best advice I can give about falling is about landing, the darkness says. Darkness does not overtake light, the clock says. Sounds of laugher fading way, the season says. The body doesn’t know how to lie, the lie says. Misremembering is in itself revealing, the lie says. I can only be reduced to…

We Eat at Hooters, It Takes All Day

I ask my father what it was like to die. “Angels regularly shed their wings, and that’s what flower petals are,” he says, but I remind him I’m not my baby sister and to shoot me straight. He says, “Death comes first then the dying begins.” He says, “You spend more time dead than you…