Poems

The Blueprint Under the BuildingI drew the original plans with considerable ambition —the life of a man who was going to inhabit his potential fully,who was going to become the definite editionof himself he could already see, unrulywith its own specificity, its own insistent clarityabout what it was and where it was going. The blueprint […]

The Body Keeps the ScoreThe fever broke at three a.m.and left me soaking through the sheets—a battleground of cells and bloodand everything that bleeds. I thought I knew this body once,thought I held the reins,but something got inside the wallsand rerouted every vein. The white cells charge. The white cells fall.A war I cannot seewhile

The Blue Distance Seven hours ahead and an ocean between us means your morning is my nightI’m reaching through the dark trying to touch skin that’s bathed in different lightthe phone screen glows but can’t convey the warmth of fingers interlacedor how your breath feels on my neck or how your absence leaves this tracedacross

The Blue Light Burial The screen ignites with a jagged pulse of desperate fontA frantic inventory of every ghost you choose to hauntYou poured your guts into a text that’s three miles longA manifesto of trauma played entirely too strongI watch the bubbles vanish as the read receipt turns blueA tiny digital autopsy of what

The Birthdays AfterMy birthday the year he died was the strangest birthday —the first of the birthdaywithout his call,the quiet of the phonebetween eight and nine a.m.,the alonequality of the morningwithout the particular scriptof the call,the specific equipped-ness of his greeting. He always called at eight-fifteen — never eight, never nine,eight-fifteen,the particular intentof his punctuality

The Appetite I Was Born WithShe said I’m done acting surprised by myself,I’m done playing polite for a room that won’t care.She traced it back past rings and good-byes,past bedroom curtains and barroom air,past every sermon in somebody’s mouth,past every jealous stare, past every cheap dare.She said my wanting never needed training—it showed up early

The Babysitter Tapes The babysitter used to record us sleepingA camcorder on the dresser, red light blinkingShe said it was for safetyMy parents never questioned it Twenty years later she diedAnd the tapes came to us in a boxLabeled by date, two hundred nightsOf children sleeping in infrared We watched them out of morbid curiosityAnd

The Anniversary We Almost Forgot The anniversary I’m thinking about is not the calendar one —that one we handle, we’ve built a ritual around it —I mean the other anniversary, the one we invented:the specific date that the thing got real between us.We almost forgot it once — the third one, busy year —and I

The Apology I Owe Myself I’ve been keeping a running ledger of my failures—every dropped ball, every quarter of the year’sworth of the didn’t-quite, catalogued and filedunder the heading of the less-than. Wildthat I’d never hold a friend to this accounting,never press the red pen to the mountingevidence and call it settled. But myself—I’ve been

The Amazon CartI opened up my laptop at eleven-thirty at night,the house was quiet, everything was theoretically right,I needed one specific thing, a simple little tool,but one specific thing has never been the rule. The recommendations showed me what I didn’t know I needed,and something in the algorithm read my wants and seeded,a garden of