Skip to main content

Poetry

Redaction/ monument

September 8, 2020

 When I was a child, I used to speak like a child, think like a child, reason like a child; when I became a man, I did away with childish things I CORINTHIANS 13:11  Redaction? No, monument: a             [...]

Cyclorama

September 8, 2020

Outside the Visitor Center—patrons queuing up in
khaki camo shorts, baseball caps, Where Big Bucks
Lie
, boxes of MoonPies wheeling by—two black
men with rubber gloves, with Windex, on a July
Monday, polish the bronze Lincoln.

Love Note: Surely

September 8, 2020

Surely you stay my certain own, you stay
obtuse. Surely your kisses were little poisons 
gripping tight my lips, my arms, mapping their way
across my unsure body. Surely, this fission

Greatest Nigger Who Ever Lived

September 8, 2020

in the selfie he is currently texting to “Lula Mae,”
the man next to me on flight 4853
to Columbia, dressed in a black turtleneck
and a thick double chain,

Excess

September 8, 2020

Two boys, pink in their manhood, lean over a balcony, full 
of teeth. Below: a brown man, skin tired of holding his bones. 
Work falls in shadows around his feet. 
The Puget Sound is bluer than any dream or sky. The boys loom, pink.

Evil

September 8, 2020

I used to believe there was so much evil in the world,
and though I’m the gentlest of all my friends, I never saw a rose in a vase

Ta Prohm

March 2, 2020

A stifling heat—the air heavy—
and all around the loud, wet forest 
knotting the gaps in its own sound.

A peace long earned, then broken;

Old Croghan Man

March 2, 2020

Only a torso now, the head
long severed from the neck, pelvis
twisted off like a stubborn root.

Lapwings

March 2, 2020

A March sky pinned with stars—
purple, almost, and a blue mist in the wheat stubble.
Under the laburnum, we waited—
the chains of leaf, its cascades of gold flower
gone, and the whole tree drooping

Pages