You needn’t believe in ghosts to dance with them. Just ask the Robin napping in the quiet of a broken fountain, drunk on jasmine and sugar. Ask drowsy Orion, who was up all night, or the Taiga, bent on its […]
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Love in Other Worlds: A Sonnet
June 4, 2022
To write love poems when this world’s a mess
is like, depending on your point of view,
finding jasmine on the moon—an excess
of joy where all is bleak—or dreams of blue
sky at night, of food in famine…
Mourners
May 29, 2022
We are all mourners now, our clothes
funeral shrouds we tear off our backs
when the time comes (and it will come);
in one pocket we carry brushes for tidying
the graves we stumble on in schools, churches,
nightclubs, concerts, grocery stores, streetcorners…
Numb
May 22, 2022
I can’t decide anything these days: sonnet or free verse;
to read on the couch or spend my son’s brief nap putting
away dishes as if dishes could ever stay clean; hope or
despair…
Paper Plane
March 10, 2022
Bad news blares from every stamen, every mouth, every
passing car and leaf blower. I am coated in dust. It has
been too long since I left this spot. How do trees do it?
Do they too grow stiff and restless
Of War and War and War
March 2, 2022
“When you attack us, you will see our faces. Not our backs, but our faces.” – President Volodymyr Zelensky Beneath a Bougainvillea-laced trellis I read of war and war and war when I am startled by a sound deep and […]
The Price of Gas
February 25, 2022
No one is to blame for anything anymore.
Or is it that everyone is to blame for everything?
Maybe the world has gotten too small: so many billions
of us, incomprehensible to ourselves, let alone
one another, crowded together
Ukraine
February 22, 2022
long before the stamps commemorating peace,
before factories resumed churning out grenades,
some made off with blueprints for conquest,
taped them to the walls of their dreams
The Business of Life and Death
January 31, 2022
Suppose I grant you the premise of your question.
Should I gather up my limbs at once
and build something immortal with them?
What could I construct to outlast
the drowsy calm of this moment?
Elephant
January 20, 2022
Out of the blue our three-year-old
declares he doesn’t like the elephant.
For days he repeats—unbidden, as if recalling
a nightmare—that he doesn’t like the elephant.