Category: Poetry

my child, you will ascend water. it doesn’t matter what your feet and bones are made of. let go of the happy bullshit and do the worm through this life. at your best, you are a comical and clumsy creature— and it is a mechanism of beauty. you have permission to do what you can…

Little by little, the Chesapeake Bay Bridge gives itself back to ocean storms; c o n c r e t e and s t e e l dust blue crabs and oysters in the depths; some people pay to be driven                    across, shudder in their own…

wake into your body s’ soft ache   watch as the day unhinges its jaw   promises to devour this quiet want   how quickly the light empties   how small the animal’s cage   can you see the darkness gathering   a murmuration of arrows overhead

Count the bullet holes in the seat cushion slowly—show me their intricate linguistic pattern near my cheek. Keep the car running. Keep the radio on. Point me toward the inside of the house so this won’t result in injury. Shift into gear without thinking—like something ready to put on the brake. Imagine we are good…

It was the night of the Worm Moon, low and full in the March sky, though we couldn’t see it, not under our wool blanket of clouds. You were standing at the counter cutting vegetables when I offered you two paper cranes — folded triangles   … [Click here to purchase a copy of the…

The way my mother tells it, I ran away. She didn’t shove me out the front door at sixteen. Afterwards, she remembers my little sister possessed by a poisonous anger but has no recollection of dragging her through the house by her hair. The history of our family was oral, repeated to herself in the…

Sword in the bonestone. Blade rhumb lining the tongue. I was really sick but didn’t know it. One by one the acupuncturist tlcks out the rostrum-like pins—forehead cheeks chin—save for the splinter embedded in the meridian of my soft spot, crown of the governing vessel. Monster irresistible like the rhinoceros. Spiny spiky anteater. Hedgehog cousin.…

When the sea breeze makes its way inland through all of the cranes & concrete forms of downtown, past the new floor-to-ceiling windows, & in amongst the suburbs’ shadow box fences, I watch the palm fronds behind my computer monitor alternate between a mild daze-like sway & orgasmic tremble. Sometimes I fantasize about what a…

Rub her tiny protruded belly in circles and the sin will crawl out, fill a room like prayer. Her first word is mine. Do not let her use your heart as a tool. You cannot take body from her. You must keep her alive, let her fatten up like a little disaster. Under her coiled…