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Poetry
Twenty-Five O’Clock
In this saved hour I want to praise / The otherworldly feel of it — / As if physics and gravity were a phase / Outgrown and now, at last, what we suspected / Was possible is possible, the future behind us.
April 2013Old Paint
Sometimes he seems strange to me. I notice that his hair is thinning in front, that it poufs up a little, which makes him look like an aging cowboy.
April 2013The Magic Of Macy’s
I am nineteen, standing behind the Coach / counter at Macy’s Herald Square. / This feels like my first real job: I take / a bus to the city; I wear a suit; / I ask strangers if I can help them, / even though I actually can’t help them, / since I know so little about leather goods.
March 2013Five Skunks
Graduation was awful. When I handed Jholie her diploma, / that idiotic, oversized black mortarboard slid down my forehead / & covered my eyes & out in the stands everyone started to laugh
March 2013At The Padre Hotel In Bakersfield, California
It’s Saturday night, and all the heterosexuals / in smart little dresses and sport coats / are streaming into what we didn’t know / was the hoppingest spot between Las Vegas and LA.
February 2013Unloose
Fifth grade, summer of the green one-piece. / I was waiting out in front of the YMCA, downtown / Orlando, and there was a man on a motorcycle / under the portico where Mom picked me up.
February 2013Some Marionettes
One afternoon years back, in a distant city, I found myself staring / into the window display of a toy store that some ingenious window / designer & puppet maker had fashioned of cardboard and papier-mâché / & painted to look like the very street I was on
February 2013Family Tree
I watch my son high in the magnolia / where branches thin. His sister / at the foot of the tree shrieks for him / to come down and play with her.
January 2013Leah’s Daughter
The workshop was just about to get started when somebody noticed / that Leah looked glum & distracted & asked what was wrong, / & Leah told us her daughter had called from Iraq that morning, / hysterical, screaming & weeping.
January 2013The Language Of Sky
I’ve moved on. I hope you can too. / And just like that, I am lost. / It is possible we will not meet / again in this life.
January 2013
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