June 10, 2026 Showstopper
There I was
torn chiffon & tarnished silk,
the spotlight froze it all–
dust settling from the warm light,
eyes of serpents or fox or both,
mouths agape & the announcer’s stuttering words.
one hand over my breast,
the other holding the remains of my gown;
I still feel
June 3, 2026 Mood Swings
A tear
(drop)
through my eye lands
on the machinery of my cheek
And sparks shoot off of my crackling face
The mask distorts in unnatural twitch
A pole in my brain spins
and spits ribbons of storm
as a
giant
flying carousel
rises from the top of my head
May 20, 2026 Sepulchress
Digging beneath the dirt of my body is the only
way I know to escape it: its fatal birdcage, its sung
prison of bones. And as I labor You tell me of all the women
who failed to listen, how now they are enshrouded
in salt pillars & sunken in
May 15, 2026 Roberta's Little Creatures
An ekphrastic of Roberta Hahn Edward's 2025 watercolor of a "Little Creature"
She started when still quite young,
creating little husks of life
on watercolor paper, bringing them
into being, wringing them from pores
in the sheet, bright and strange
little monsters, never mean or dirty
April 23, 2026 an ode to Maybe
a Close Family Friend has an adage:
never trade a definitive Yes
for a Maybe
He never said a continuation for what I should do
when the potential Maybe
represents Everything I Want
not that I want to leave Everything and Everyone I know
for an Unknown
but that the
March 23, 2026 Here’s to the Cardinal Puff
My wife and I put out seeds to feed
the little critters in our courtyard:
wrens and juncos, mourning doves,
squirrels, chipmunks, now and then
a rabbit. This morning a cardinal.
That reminded me of Cardinal Puff,
a drinking game we used to play
on Okinawa back in 1968; I’
April 27, 2025 Indigo Goodbyes
“in a vale of blue orchid gowns/sewn with bachelor buttons/in lavender blue fields”
April 21, 2025 The Ficus Frost
“to the garage bound welders masked/in metal, tampering the eternal flame”
April 17, 2025 Melodic Dream of Attic
“Little dragonfly,/Gliding, flew.”
April 13, 2025 A Chapel
“Yet these walls sound with echoes of the past,/With whispered prayers which linger in the air/And animate this space – still holding fast:/A shelter from the passing world’s despair.”
April 10, 2025 The Incorporated Town and Cold War Clocks
“The train cars are trying to sleep/in the postal town. Purple tracks/forsake concrete footer and loading/dock pad. The pale moon/asks homes to hold the bones.”
March 31, 2025 Daisy Chain
“Astrology is not a science because women conceived it/and it’s not a religion because the stars, even/with the pictures they pattern,/could never take the place of a god”
March 27, 2025 Overpass to Memphis
“This insufficient code of the soil—/aphasia’s shorthand where/language lathers in mud, masquerades its atoms”
March 25, 2025 The Bells, on Evening Paths
“The tower tall strikes bells. The day slinks out/Leaving behind skies watercolor clear/And gives the evening air the taste of song”
March 20, 2025 The Worst of Our Fathers
“we struck/each other so often, too often,/like astronauts/scraping for the last flight/back to earth”
March 18, 2025 My Best Friend’s Sugar Daddy
“waxen winter plants, an oil portrait of a stillborn son,/sensory deprivation tank”
March 13, 2025 Miscalculated
“For this, we built a star-searcher/and launched it/into the galaxies:/Mirror upon giant mirror/sifting through time.”
March 9, 2025 Observance, 2022
“Someone recently fell/into an industrial mixer at the latter’s factory./The company sent bread/from the same facility to her funeral.”
March 6, 2025 Saints
“What kind of light flames on them? What’s on fire—/A church? A shop? But also inward: desire”