published work
The Mcneese review, Volume 61
Confessions
We people-watch the downtown regulars,
gnats circling us, the cumulus clouds above
boiling in and out
Conversation in hand motions—Sandy and I
telling stories, her cigarette burning,
then dimming, too young for yellow fingers.
Memory is time with its loose hem
or storm cellar with padlocks rusted,
images stifled by sunlight.
We leave the people and buildings, recede into woods,
into lamplight of evening
Sandy shows me her bruises, tiny time markers
in their blue and yellow notes under sweat
I think I hear her say, the moon is an observer.
spillway magazine, NO. 16
Salt Ignites Memory
Dirt packs up
under this concrete crust
of a yard’s stretching
until it fires green things
to growing. Salt in the air
ignites memory—your eyelids
colored red, hot pinch of sand
clayed into hands.
A thought of your younger self:
magnolias cheat grass, thyme,
trains are freight cars of longing.
Watch the stretch of fields
feel infinite, as tickets to far away
places are clenched in our hands.
I watch you sleep
until the woods stop moving.
Margie: The American Journal of Poetry, Volume 7
The Order of Things
She said there is an order to things:
to picking the surprise lilies
only when they are first bloomed,
to a first kiss underneath the magnolia tree.
There is an order to living,
she said, although she stayed indoors
most her life. She found answers
by looking out of windows.
From watching the town go by. She thought
she saw God take the dead when it was time.
Someone else told her
it was just the sun breaking through the clouds,
a spotlight reaching the fields below.
She took in visitors and gave them a place to live
until they left for the next town,
made them biscuits each morning
and gave them their own Bibles.
In winter, she missed the people outside.
She took in fire like a house guest,
feeding it hunks of wood,
rocking back and forth in front of it,
reading books aloud until it went to sleep.
There is also an order to dying.
She was found three days after being made
a dead woman, book and flower on her chest.
She had known the next step
in the order of things:
her white hair spread around her,
a crown for the dying.
the velro reader, no. 2
(from Town of Ghosts)
I move through the streets of downtown
past the last shotgun houses,
their farms waning
my car
possessed by a faulty engine;
its shutter shaking me into memory.
***
On a subway, I see her head barely turn;
a girl about Sandy’s age then, her profile,
the shadow of her nose
a ghost until—
the stop is pulled and she turns fully,
her face a moon waxing, and I am shifting
in my seat,
the view outside blurring past.
***
Sandy calls before dinner to tell me
her window is shattered,
that she has a ghost in her chimney
(it was a bat).
All night we stay up, the covers over our heads,
flashlights burning on.
We read ghost stories aloud
until her parents yell from their bedroom.
We spend all night whispering secrets;
we thought time could be beveled then.