Every Creeping Thing

  This is a poem on hierarchy. Or history. Or anoles, live ones, four-fingered feet spread as if braced for impact. Or anoles, dead ones, flattened like bloody bookmarks on sidewalks. To creep upon the earth means to be ruled over—but once there was a soldier by the name of …

Working Waterfront

Winner of the 2025 Maine Postmark Poetry Contest, held in conjunction with the Belfast Poetry Festival.   We argue, at the end of the workday, about which one of us smells the worst and you always win – you, smelling like the backside   of low tide, after a day …

A Confession

After Czeslaw Milosz Lord, I loved the first days of Boston winter and walks through Copps Hill where the graves stick black and crooked like rotted teeth. Also the man, or his blue eyes, the way their color thinned like melting ice when he got stoned. That he was twenty …

I return to Brooks in the last third of my life

  Hiding from politics of the present, the LP crackles and spins. Bronzeville still resonates, comes alive, still cuts deep.   I wish I had the courage to try to be in conversation with this woman who meant so much to me.   Now, I can only respond to her …

Melogold Grapefruit

Winner of the 2025 Maine Postmark Poetry Contest, held in conjunction with the Belfast Poetry Festival.   Stacked & freakishly stunning, each orb, every flashing peel glossy, mooning yellow hazards beckoning amber & oblate. The most beautiful fruit, a dimpled curiosity, wholly new in my winter-chapped hand. I, too, felt …

Threnody for Words

  Language falling from my head, my name, address to my childhood home, and every synonym for “stop” the first to leave me. Easy as fists of hair that come away in my hands. Easy as, after three years of refusing to look my mother in the eye, I forget …

blades

Sex Drive Homestead

  Sometimes you want a sandwich and I don’t, so go make yourself a sandwich without me. It’s fine. It doesn’t have to say anything about our relationship or our desire to be known or why you think you’re turning into your father or who will win in November or …

That old, yellow pair

after Gwendolyn Brooks At least, they had each other—another voice to say grace before eating, another pair of light brown eyes looking back once the beans were done.   Two adherents of a religious order, quiet and solemn at the table among the little they had in their mid-century, rented …