Poems

The Watcher’s Shadow In the corner of a darkened room, a shadow watches,full of gloom, haunted by the watcher’s dread.Eyes that glow with an eerie light, filling the heart with endless fright,Whispers creep from the silent dark,marking the soul with a phantom’s mark.Hands that reach from the unseen, pulling at the soul’s unseen,A heart that […]

The Weight of Staying He stayed because the leaving took a kind of will he’d misplaced,somewhere in the years of this the will got repositioned, erasedby the incremental settling that feels like nothing at the timebut adds up to a man who lost the will to make the climb. The house is good enough, the

The Wake They laid him out in the front room like the old days called for,the flowers on the casket and the neighbors filing past,the whiskey on the table and the old sad stories shared forthe man who’d held the room whenever he was lastto leave a gathering, who told the same four storiesevery time

The War Photographer She came in on a press pass with a camera at her chest,and the soldiers watched her move through it like someone past the rest,she framed the broken buildings and the children at the wall,and she pressed the shutter on the things that no one wants to call. There is an argument

The Vigil I have been keeping the vigil through the long and patient years,The vigil of the cold and of the deliberate and the fears,That the moment would pass before the preparation was complete,And the vigil is the patience of the man who will not retreat. Not the vigil of the grief but the vigil

The Waiting Season The waiting season is different in the year after recovery,it carries the memory and the discoveryof how close the last one came, which sharpens every waitinto a keener thing, which is the recovery’s specific trait. The waiting season with a full grain store is still a wait,the waiting season with the memory

The Unfinished Crossword Folded in quarters on the nightstand,pencil tucked inside the crease.Fourteen across: a seven-letter wordfor the opposite of peace.He had gotten twelve of them. The restwere blank, the grid half-dark, half-white,a mind interrupted mid-solution,a brain switched off mid-fightwith a clue that would have come to himby morning, would have surfacedin the shower or

The Unfurnished Face The tubes of artificial health are standing in a rowI’ve opted for the actualthe terrifying lowMy skin is just a document of every wasted yearA cartography of boredom and the very local fear I crossed the threshold with my nakedraw and grayish cheekTo find if the world is as cruel as the

The Sympathy Card Hallmark makes fifteen hundred versions of the thing,each one aiming at a different kind of loss,but all of them attempting the impossible springof language across the gap, the albatrossof having to say something when there’s nothingthat the language has for what has just occurred.I stood in the aisle for twenty minutes stuffingthrough

The Things I’ve Forgotten I’ve forgotten the sound of his laugh,which is the thing I fear most —Not the photographs, not the ghostOf the memory in the specific locations,But the specific oscillationsOf his laugh — the specific rhythmAnd frequency and the whimOf what made it come out, what made it fully his. I remember that