Poems

The Gravity of Rooms The bedroom pulls the hardest.Something in the air itself has changed—thicker now, heavier, as if the moleculesrearranged themselves around his absence,filled the vacuum with a denser kind of darkthat weighs on the chest and the eyelidsand the back of the throat where the sparkof speech used to catch and light upinto […]

The Grief That Passes Through You The grief that passes through ain’t less real for passing —The wave that floods the body, gatheringIts full weight in the chest then pulling back,The sudden swell, the slow retreat, the knackOf loss that arrives unbidden, settles in,Delivers everything it holds, and then withinThe ordinary, receding. I’ve had both

The Good He Did They yanked his photo off the hallway wall,but left the screw holes in the woodThey called it clean accountability,then kept the wing he paid for, warm and goodI watched the donors clap in sober suits,the same hands flinch when rumors brewedA city loves a savior’s headline,even when the savior turns out

The Gothic Arches of the Soul Beneath a cathedral sky, ribbed vaults of night ariseThe soul’s gothic arches stretch, defiant, toward the blackest heightsEach column forged from longing, from all that the world deniesTheir stone etched with scars of battles, tremors, and frightsThe hollow of darkness cradles ambition’s secret seedWhere shadows threaten and whisper, but

The Glass Between He watches the world through the specific glassof a man who has grown too comfortable to passthrough the membrane of the window into weather —the glass between is glass forever. The street outside has all its usual participants,the commerce of the ordinary and the ambulantsof purpose moving through the frame like film

The Good Grief There’s a grief that’s clean — not painless, not easy,But clean in the way that a wound healed the breezyWay is clean: properly, fully,The grief for the full life, the dulyMourned and fully loved person who diedAfter the long life with the wideAnd examined and well-finished quality. He died at eighty-seven, in

The Frequency Below the Basement The infrasound was first detected by the university teamMapping seismic background noise along the fault line’s seamA steady 18.98 hertz, the frequency that sitsBelow the threshold of the human ear but hitsThe human body at the resonant frequency of the eye18.98 hertz makes the eyeball vibrate, and therebyThe peripheral vision

The Ghost Town Chronicles: A Documentary Crew’s Descent into the Haunting Past Wind howled across the high prairie,dragging dust through the bleached ribs of a forgotten West.Once, Dusty Hollow had been a nexus of cattle drives, shotgun weddings,and saloon brawls;now, it stood silent and stripped by time,its main street choked by tumbleweeds and the ghosts

The Extra Shift The architecture of the office is a coldmeasured cageI spend the currency of age to fill a hollow pageThe sun is a cold concept in a world of LEDI sold the vision of the sky to find a way to beMy pulse is synchronized with every ticker on the wallI watch the

The Farmer at Harvest He planted in the cold when the ground was still resisting,He watched the weather every day with his full listing,Of what needed rain and what needed sun and what needed wait,He had been farming forty years and he knew his fate. The farmer at harvest standing in the field he grew,The