Poems

The Gratuity of Sanity The corporate manual grants a single solar arc to mend the fractured boneTo scrub the soot of sixty hours from a heart that turned to stoneI sit in silence while the dishwasher performs its rhythmic metal humCounting the frantic minutes until my brain becomes entirely numbThe spreadsheet ghosts are screaming from […]

The Girl They Forgot to Discharge Her name’s not on the roster, not scratched into the wall,but the nurses still make spacefor her when making morning calls.There’s always one plate left untouched,still warm but never claimed,and when I asked who it was for, they all forgot her name. They say the room at the end

The Girl Who Talks to Needles She waits by the rolling silver tray like it’s a chapel of chromeand quiet fire,whispering sweet nothings to each syringe like they’re secrets she’ll never retire.She names them gently with the reverence of someone who’s bledfor grace,and she smiles just a little too widewhen one finally recognizes her face.

The Enthusiasm I Used to HaveI signed the form for the thing in the beginning of the yearwhen the beginning of the year had that particular clearlight on the possible — I went the first time with genuine investment,went the second time with slightly less, and that was the assessment. The instructor has my absence

The Funny in the Ordinaryis the hardest kind to find—it requires you to slow downand to pay a different kindof attention to the detailsof a weekday afternoon,and find the bit that’s been hidingin the ordinary room. The extraordinary is easy.Anyone can do the disaster.But the funny in a trip to get your mail?That territory is

The Energy It TakesThey said come out, the room is good, you’ll love it,said it twice, sent the details, name your priceand they’d meet it. It’s been too long since I’ve been seen. But the calculus of walking into any room runs:the parking, the standing, the names I dig upwhile landing the handshake, the noise

The Conversation I Keep Having I keep having the conversation with him in my head —The running dialogue with the deadThat grief conducts, the one-sidedArgument where one side is decidedBy the living and the other is silenceThat you interpret as the violenceOr the kindness of the ambiguous. I run the conversation on the commute, the

The Couch Already Knows My ShapeThree years of dedicated contact have produced this exact indent–this geographic record of the evenings not so elegantly spentin the posture of a man who genuinely intended to do a number of thingsand instead developed a long-term relationship with broken springs. The fabric’s got my longitude and latitude memorized–the topography

The Doll in the Ducts There’s a doll in the duct above my bed,she watches me sleep with a cracked-up head.Her eye’s on a spring and it swings with the breeze,and sometimes she whispers through the vents with a wheeze. She knows my dreams, she’s stitched to the wall,hung by her smile in the hospital

The Ceiling Never Changes, and neither does the hour.The plaster holds the same cracks it held before the powerwent out inside whatever used to live behind these eyes —now something flat and steady where the living used to rise. The coffee cools, untouched, beside a phone that doesn’t ring,and somewhere in the distance, the fading