Poems

The Shopping Cart Confession Forty-seven items for a man who lives alone,the shopping cart’s a casket and I’m filling it with boneand gristle, brisket, chicken thighs in family packs of ten,the optimism of the purchase says I’m hosting but I’m not, againit’s any given weeknight and everything I’m buying is for me,the shopping cart confession […]

The ScreamerShe warned me on the first night. Said she gets loud.I said I could handle it. She looked proud,Amused at my confidence. You haven’t heard me yet,She said. And she was right — the audacityOf her volume defied what a throat should do.She hit notes no soundproofing could pursue.First time she came, the shriek

The Second BodyEvery hospital keeps a code for the patient who dies twice—not medically, but bureaucratically—the paperwork’s priceof a person who expires, is documented, and then is foundalive in the room, which is a problem for the surround. My cousin died in the ICU on a bitter winter night—cardiac, documented, the chart, the time, the

The Scholarship Kid He got the scholarship by keeping every grade above the line,He worked the kitchen shift on weekends for the supplemental dime,He carried all his books across the campus in the cold,He was not the richest and he was not the bold. The scholarship kid who earned it with the grade,The scholarship kid

The Room Before I Entered Before I pushed the door open, things were a certain way,The hierarchy was settled, every voice knew what to say,The furniture was arranged around a kind of silent king,And everyone had learned their place without questioning anything. I learned to read a room before I learned to read a face,You

The Room at the End of WantingBeyond the last of wanting, past the corridor of need,there’s a room he found by accident when wanting stopped to feeditself on nothing — when the appetite had eaten all it had.The room at the end of wanting isn’t terrible or sad. A room is just a room. Four

The Right to Walk Straight I did not inherit the land or the money or the title free,I inherited the work ethic that my father handed me,He said the right to walk straight has to be earned every single dawn,And a man who has not earned it has no business carrying on. The right to

The River That Stopped CaringThe river ran for thirty years without a single hesitation,cutting through the stone of the ordinary in its patient excavationof a channel through the territory of the life he thought he’d live —the river didn’t ask for much and the river had to give. It carved the canyon of his younger

The Quiet Competence You’d have to know what it costs to see how clean the work is—the quiet competence runs without the chorusof acknowledgment, the daily maintenanceof the adequate: no witness, no applause, the patienceof the self-managing, the interior adminof the functional person running withinthe quiet competence, the scaffoldingthe world relies on without the handling.

The Quiet Devotion I don’t write her poems, that’s not what I doI don’t show up with the roses and the viewFrom the cliffside where I’ve laid out a candlelit eventI don’t operate that way and she doesn’t resent The absence of the theater in the daily loveI don’t perform devotion for the gallery aboveI