Conditional love begets self-preservation.Neither of these are love.I used to hold my talents outLike seashells in my palmsAnd watch him take them one by one,Turn them in his hand and marvelAt the softness of their underbellies,The pearlescent lavender of their skin.I would smile and shake my head as I watched himBury them in the sand…
Category: Poems
Mother In Christian Patriarchy
“I love you,” she saysAnd drives a blade into my chest,Holding one, two…Then eases it out like a root.She fans her hands over my bodyAnd studies the fluidPulsing, draining, now poolingUnder my back.“Okay,” she says, nudging her glassesWith a bloody thumb.Fingers flutter over steaming vials nearbyAnd she pulls at one Marked submission.She holds it above…
Reading Li-Young Lee’s Poem, “The Undressing,” In an Airport Lounge
In my peripherals I see the manbeside me laughand turn toward me.No—toward a mark on the wall behind me.I don’t look up. I’m reading.I take a sip of hot cardamon tea.We are travelers among other travelers in an outpost by the sea.He is talking with the manbeside him, saying where he is going. “Into a…
Whispers from Elsewhere #2
I’d heard it most when on the cusp of sleep:A whisper, unlike a voice, that scurriedFrom one ear to the next Murmuring something light and breathlessBefore slipping into the grey-black humOf a room bent on rest.Usually I’d turn, pull the sheets to my noseAnd breathe the scent of yesterday’s warmth(something of lotion and laundry and…
Eastward
I will show you something different from eitherYour shadow at morning striding behind youOr your shadow at evening rising to meet you. — T.S. Eliot We do, each of us, move like the sunfrom one crest to another. Though some have learned to turn, follow shadows in the evening–go where they lean.There, they say, in…
Light Falls and Fills
Light falls and fills… – Theodore Roethke I feel for the switch,Stroking black air until myFingers find the light.
Holiday Cards
Scuffing through the kitchen, I stopped to right a slanted card, slipping, as it was, under gravity and magnet. I pulled its corner to a wrinkle-black space, an open patch among the rest, the red and green and gold and seasoned blend of photograph-news: a baby curling into its breath, scraps of gilded glass, a…
Windfall
I released a leaf along the path to see where it would go.The wind, she tugged and danced it up to the high rock where it came to rest, orange-gold in the early light. Then, without warning, the same wind raged and tumbled it down to a crevice where it caught in shadow and decay.I…
One Word
One word from you and I would have–When I thought at lastthe sun was shining, the storm abating, and the colors returning to the world between our worlds (not as vibrant, but vibrant nonetheless)it took only a word–one word–to realizeI’d imagined the color, seen it glimmering through my own translucent windows which I’d taken great…
Sparrow
“There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.” – William Shakespeare, Hamlet I found a remnant of your lifewhen I arrived. Caught on the glass,it fluttered as I slowed until,stopped in the windless room,(like you) it grew still.I had drifted—the sun was behind me, pulling its golden blanket across the late-summer landscape,the war-room…