America on the Brink
October 1, 2025
I am awakened too early. I cannot be awake. The growl of my neighbor’s leaf-blower is what prehistoric man, cowering in his cave, cowered from. How do you forgive your neighbor?
poetry
126 posts
America on the Brink
Nostalgia
Remember when bumper stickers read Free Tibet or End Apartheid, and we agreed? Remember when there was just one war on TV, like a movie whose plot you knew by heart?
poetry
Apology
For the promises I never made, or kept; for the friends I wronged, or let down, or lost touch with; for doors I failed to hold open, grandmothers who bore their groceries unaided,...
Be The Change
Silence
Last night I caught a dole of doves robbing me of sleep with their yapping. They accused me of such terrible things—an oppressor of birds...
America on the Brink
Lottery
For once, I throw my lot in with the rest. At the bleak store that sells tobacco and liquor, two bucks buys me this slip that feels sinful and foolish in my hands...
poetry
Through Time
Your flight delayed, you scroll your photos app. There is the dog you just adopted, eyes alert and energetic. There is your son roughhousing with him on the carpet, wild with joy...
poetry
The Broom
He was dying and I didn’t know it. He was dying and the tests were inconclusive. He was dying and I changed his diet. He was dying and he couldn’t tell me.
poetry
Ode to the Not-Here
Love, before loss, is an ode to here: the softness of shampooed fur, the quickening of a thousand nerve endings in each fingertip each time you pet him, the scratch of paws running to greet you.
America on the Brink
Leaves of Grass
I abhor the grass, the leaves that turn to blades under the whetstone of heat, the worms, blind and desperate and slippery, that wriggle forth in the wet, the sucking of mud on bare feet...
Be The Change
What AI Still Can't Do
Write a poem that drops me to my knees. Strike me square in the face with a fist of birdsong. Torture me to orgasm with silk.
Be The Change
Picnic, America, 2025
Wrapped in moss like a layer of new skin over a third-degree burn, the hills invite us for a picnic. Rain has washed out the stains..
Be The Change
Earthquake
Wet and moonless, the Japanese maple drips her pigment onto a desolate, metal halide-lit stretch of road, until pink-red rivulets parade ostentatiously toward...