A Traveler’s Guide to Goodbyes
Vow #1: No more getting high. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. I’ll say it until it sticks. Last time, it was a resolution. Everyone was making them. A month, I could do a month. One week passed. I’d had a rough day, and I …
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Frittatas
In the morning, I made two, seven eggs in each. My husband came into the kitchen just as I was whisking the second batch, and he told me that one of the buffy hens had gotten herself on top of the little black and white, that the two of them …
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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 …
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A Pound of Cure
I went to the street market with my grandmother every Sunday until I turned sixteen, when I didn’t understand her as anything other than grandma and mam, and her big voice felt like Moses splitting the sky to make room for the two of us. We’d see folks from …
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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 …
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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, …
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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. …
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Coney Island Babies
The mothers hugged their boys close in the summer, afraid to let them wander in the sun of a world still alien to them. The fathers, out of habit, drew lines around the building, confining them to their narrow apartments. They closed windows and made it so the boys …
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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 …
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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, …
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