Category: Poetry

She never turns off the coffee pot. Black and boiling, an empty glass bomb slowly warming to a pending fire. When I turn it off she shivers, says it’s too cold for her to consider, then blames me when she burns her tongue. Next time I’ll let it sit, sip my mug from outside. Watch…

In the mariners’ church, those dredged from the sea laid out like fresh catch.   Identified by candlelight, dried foam at their mouth, the sea changed them.   Carried to the limits of water, the waves rescinded their promise, leaving them white as whalebone.   Lastly seeing the ultramarine world they occupied completely;   their…

Holding her eye-level after the bath, the towel damp under her arms, she cranes back and looks at me almost cross-eyed, as if until now she’s seen my face in pieces: eyes, nose, in the same orbit, uncontained by any outer limit. Now she sees the whole.  She steadies herself, her palms on each side…

Who came down first, I’ll never know, but I suspect a fledgling fell, down the cabin   chimney flue, and couldn’t, didn’t fly, so new, the wings, the body ready but not ready,   so fell.  And does a house wren calculate the cost of not one, but two, fledglings lost? I   wasn’t there.…

Hillsborough, County Down, September 15, 2012   He must have thought it another bloody rough and tumble scrum, a bone crushing brawl heads bashing, the thud of bodies, skin burning, eyes mud-blinded arms and legs slipping through his fingers. Sin-binned.   But he was on his farm. Sweet-scented breezes slipped down from Slievenamon. The Holsteins…

for J.   A cardinal flies straight into my window, stuns himself, the sound of his body ripples against glass even after he falls confounded and quiet in the bushes below. By the time I rush out on the porch, his body is aloft, dazed the way you stumbled out of that bar the night…

I hold onto the blue    edge of the couch a boat to its shore      our knees the waves   chess game on the table    floating from the day we said we’d finish        the moon full on close up   turning to look       like a mirror…

The boatyard is deserted; slips empty, save the few holding   boats wrapped in tarp & covered for winter. The last leaves cringing in piles or   swept into crevices will soon be dust. Father, you read,   stiltingly, with earnest difficulty, a child’s book to me, one line   at a time, describing this…

Thinking of your father, you stop at the casino in Lame Deer with the intention to play Blackjack.   From the parking lot, you watch a tall woman in cut-off denim shorts carry a toddler and a liter bottle of water   as she walks the side of the highway. The road is hot and…