Psalm for the Nervous System

  Praise the nerves, praise the nervous– the child in first grade afraid for no good reason, in her hunch ten thousand thousand buzzing bones: her dear strangers’ spindles and axes, dear strangers’ blood rising from under her buttons, recognizing the threat, the hidden blood in an alien hall white …

Do the Right Thing

  Mockingbirds like a boombox in the deciduous trees. Toddlers expel tiny winds from their bodies in Cadmon park. Wake up Raheem. The L train shrieks like Walt Whitman after losing a manuscript of Leaves of Grass in the East River. Wake up Raheem; it was all a dream. The …

The Horse is the Villain

  The children blindfold me, tie my dyed hair across my eyes like a harness, wedge a sock in my mouth. Struggle with the instinct toward what they can’t   grasp. Lead me to an imagined trailer, its rubber wheels, red mulch, wrestle me inside. Drive me around the property, …

On a Hillside in Umbria

Winner of the 2024 Maine Postmark Poetry Contest, held in conjunction with the Belfast Poetry Festival. cw: suicide Early this morning I heard the whip-poor-will singing from a branch in the dark. When the sun came up, he was silent and impossible to see, likely already gone from the tree. …

Evie holds the luna moth and her tattered wing,

  perched on the back of her hand as a small group of girls murmurs above, incantatory, while a few say they’ve seen it before and walk away, though   I’m not one of them. I’d remember her rhubarb limbs and white chest of fur, the yellow antennae curled like …

My Body is Around

  When my body was halfway around the world,   I was at home, fuzzed up in myself—and my   body was getting soft in a stranger’s mouth. We walked the streets.   And the lights came on—one at a time, then all at once.   They spat me out, …

The Kale Gaze

  I admit, I laughed . . . but there’s only so much . . . you can do . . . with kale . . . and I hate kale . . . almost as much . . . as the   male gaze . . . pity our …

Gallows Room

     Translated from Saadi Youssef When I close my eyes a country falls into my palms, the country that taught me I have no name, a man fated to the nation’s shoe soles. (How many times have I been under the warden’s shoes?) I still bear a scar on my …

Conversations with Chairs

  I admit I don’t know what her book’s about, this upholstery’s itchy, unkind,   an asymmetrical design that hurts my brain hovering near the humming fluorescents,   flagged hazardous by facilities management, mercurial. What does her womb look like   through a lubricated transducer, bigger, honestly, than my vibrator? …

sabbath