Death of a Fox
Winner of the 2023 Maine Postmark Poetry Contest, held in conjunction with the Belfast Poetry Festival. I always knew it would end like this: a cold night, around the end of March, when I …
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I Tell Myself, You Should Write a Poem
about a plot line from your favorite soap, call it “Marlena, Possessed. Again.” You should write a poem about gas giants not as failed stars but successful planets. About what scientists call exotic physics—gamma rays coming from the Sun, not from its core but from protons slingshot through space by …
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Everything is Equal When You’re Distorted by the Afterlife
When M told a poet, You are young and nothing is sacred, we watched the smallest bloom on the seaside roses wilt. It was a certain evening where nothing was happening. It was a certain evening where strangers were building wildflower museums. We are old and everything is sacred—the …
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Idiom Idiot
Let’s mince words: growing up, idioms weren’t a piece of pie. I skated on thin eyes spitting phrases steel-tongued, checking squints for slip-ups, trying not to drop the doll in chats. Friends would ask me to spill the frijoles or take Angel’s chisme with a grain of salt and pepper, …
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Prayers to the Patron Saint of Lost Things with Mixed Results
When we lost the Z in our Scrabble set, we ruled any N could be turned on its side. This suddenly made possible blizzard, and buzzard. Someone played pizzazz. Soon, every lost thing began to appear. My mother used to tilt her head to the left to read emoticons then …
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The Breaking
We have drowned a father, sepsis and I. Deny someone water and the body will find disease to fill it with. ∴ It’s always the stomach, bulbous and huge. A cavern holding what would take cupped hands days to fill. …
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Leftover Women
you’re gone & we’re still here firmly rooted to these scuffed floors these ancient rituals: we cord teeth & bitter lemongrass around our waists we wait in little rooms for someone …
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The First Poem I Write After My Father Dies
Because my father is dead in the darkness I hear birds. Not the willowy chirps of sparrows, not the clear insistence of cardinals. Instead, I hear him, some de-feathered pulp wailing under the rainy Connecticut skies, some scrap dragged splintery and gasping through its last night on earth. Tomorrow will …
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Finally, After Years of Being Someone Else, I’ve Slowly Become
myself. And today, I keep meeting new selves— an improved fleet of ferries traveling the same waterways but glittering and dressed in this season’s traveling clothes. I’ve conjured my life with imaginative acts, in accidents of possibility. In the pleasure of a piece of music or through the shared midnight …
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Self-Portrait in the Garden
With a soil knife, its blade speckled with deep rust. With the groundhog caught in a metal trap, too-soft big-boy tomato in its hands. The split ends I trimmed with dull scissors––I feed them to the soil, place a daffodil bulb on top. double cheerfulness, dutch master, lemon sailboat, thalia. …
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