Poems

The Plaque Polished Daily The brass is a mirror for the man I’m meant to beI’m scrubbing the tarnish with a franticmechanical energyThe chemical venom is a ghost in the back of my throatA heavy-handed vapor on a black and woolly coatMy ancestor’s signature is a jaggeddeep-cut scarA silver-gilded lie within the center of the […]

The Ritual Deep within the forest’s core, lies a circle on the floor,A place where shadows come to play,where ancient rituals hold sway.Candles flicker in the breeze, whispers echo through the trees,A coven gathers in the dark, to summon forces from the stark.Blood is spilled in sacrifice, shadows rise with chilling eyes,Chants that fill the

The Overshare at the Right Time There are two kinds of overshare: the wrong one and the right,The one that kills a dinner and the one that saves the night,I overshared at dinner once in a way that cleared the air,And the table pivoted into something real that was just there. I had been holding

The Pallbearers Six men in suits they didn’t wear quite right,uncomfortable in the formality of it,carrying the box in the specific lightof a cold morning, each one in the kitof obligation and love that he’d somehowaccumulated through the years of beingthe man he was, each pallbearer’s browcarrying the weight of the final freeing. The pallbearers

The People I Passed Let me tell you about the people that I passed on my way up,Every face I nodded at and every hand that filled my cup,The mentors and the obstacles and all the ones who bet against,The friends who turned to rivals and the rivals who made sense. There was a man

The Obituary Born in the year that was, died in the year that is,survived by the wife, three children and sixgrandchildren, retired from the businessof being himself in nineteen eighty-six.Preceded in death by the father and the mother,preceded in death by the brother from the war,and now himself preceded by anothergeneration’s memory of what he

The Ones Who Vanished She carved her particulars into the drywall beside the red-marked X,Said if they come back through that door they’ll find her teeth before her neck,Her eyes were empty postcards from a country that had long refused to heal,Every breath she reclaimed felt like something excavated from a battlefield.There were four of

The Night the Radios Went Quiet At 11:47 every frequency went dead across the dialno static, just pure silence like the air itself had diedI switched between the stations found nothing but that voidthen one voice cut through speaking numbers cold and void of life counting backward from a hundred with mechanical precisioneach digit dropping

The Obituary I Read survived by three and one dog, age sixty-twobeloved husband, father, brother, frienda lifelong fan of fishing and cold weatherpassed peacefully, and that was how it ends they listed all the towns he had ever lived inthey said he served with pride in sixty-ninethey squeezed a man into eleven lines of printand

The Morphine Protocol At the end they increase the morphine for the comfort care,The palliative protocol that manages the air,Moving in and out of lungs that are already making,The clinical sounds of what the nurses call the taking. The morphine doesn’t hasten the end, the studies show,But it reduces the suffering in the slow,Process of