## 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”