Poems

The Eulogy He stood at the podium for eleven minutesand told us who his father was in wayswe hadn’t known, the interior limitsof the man revealed in those eleven praise-and-truth-filled minutes, the story of the argumentat eighteen that they’d never fully solved,the fishing trip when he was young and meantto say something and hadn’t, the […]

The European Mink FarmThey came across the water in wire crates,broad-faced and adaptable and built for someone’s coats,the American cousins with their different ratesof breeding, their indifference to the notesof a continent that had its own arrangement,its own brown-furred inhabitants who’d heldthe riverbanks for centuries — estrangementcame fast, the way replacement always felledthe original before

The Empty Bowl We filled the empty bowl at the community celebration,we filled it as the formal act of restorationof what the famine took from the household and the nation,we filled it with the harvest and with the occasion. The empty bowl was carried to the center of the circle,the elder filled it from the

The Drive Home Every weeknight I take the same route home —not because it’s fastest, it isn’t always —but because it takes me past the spot where we first pulled over,that stupid argument that turned into something else entirely.We’d been dating three months, we were circling something,the conversation going sideways in the car,and I pulled

The Elevator Doors slide shut on the twentieth floor,mirrored walls catching what we both ignore,your perfume hits like a closed-room verdict,something expensive and slightly wrong,two inches of charged air between us, the kind that hums its own specific song,I watch you in the reflection, which is safer than watching you direct,the line of your throat

The Dream That FollowsI wake up screaming but I’m still asleep inside the nightmare,the bedroom walls are breathing and the shadows have developed teeth.My hands are someone else’s hands doing things I can’t control.The mirror shows a face that used to be minebefore it learned to split. I run down corridors that fold back on

The Drip The drip is not the flood and not the roar and not the wave,The drip is the persistent and the patient and the brave,Application of the cold and the precise and the deliberate,And the drip is what I have been doing and the drip is what I merit. Not merit in the seeking

The Disruptive Commuter The scooter company dropped two thousand scooters overnightAcross the downtown corridor without the rightOf way discussions with the city that the city required,The argument being: we’re a transportation solution hiredBy the market and the regulation will catch up,The city pulled three hundred scooters and the cupOf the public relations battle was framed

The Doomscroll Two in the morning and I’m still inside the feed that keeps on building,the feed has my specific weakness catalogued and it’s deliveringthe exact flavor of the bad news that my cortisol responds to —I didn’t seek the bad news out, the algorithm corresponds to. I’ve read the thread, I’ve been inside the

The Devil Made Me Do It They found her hands still folded in the gardenlike she’d concluded a prayer mid-breath,Bible laid open and torn on the kitchen table and nobody else was left,The preacher testified she’d been speaking in an unrecognized tongue before the teeth went black,And when the blood ran laterally up the walls