Poetry

say i was a careless shutting
of language an accident
sound whirling into the guttur

The dead leaves that won’t admit they’re dead 
are called marcescent 

It was late June, the solstice. 
The day took hours to end. You look like me,
my father said quietly.

In those days when I was the academy’s darling 
I borrowed phrases and made no claims, 
digressed gracefully from every absent thesis 

We watched a movie about
an orchestral conductor, a powerful 
woman who groomed young musicians. 
I didn’t understand the ending. 
Driving to the beach, it began to rain. 

the ogre of gratitude dangling like a chandelier from the rearview mirror asks if
you know how lucky you are, if you’ve meditated on that yet, if your heart

My therapist says a boy with a secret
is easy to control. I wonder how
Steve learned mine, if I told him

in exchange for a public chance at a longer private life, you give them
not your body, but your body’s one error in calculation. the swerve,

At just the age the unconscious
cheerleader was []
by four football players,
I suspect I was []
by Steve. 

She’d gathered ramps in the woods, although she found them 
A hyperbole of the food world, an over-priced scallion

With a finish of garlic scapes. But finding them in the forest, 
He thought, and picking them with her strong hands,