Poetry
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Cousin Mac
Winter pushes unto the land & a cold flame rises. A palmprint fades from the glass & the child wonders where it leaves to. A letter has just come in from the old country & everyone gathers around. Cousin Mac tells of a dream he’s been having lately in which he finds himself in a cave running his hands along the rock until he comes to a standing flame & above this flame there is always a message. It changes every night. He invites the family to contemplate these messages as if they were their own dream-circumstances. He hasn’t written in over a year. The family had been worried. He’d written the letter at a bar function with boots applauding all around before strolling with it under the soft-falling snows of Budapest wondering should he be concerned that an ocean stands between himself and those he feels closest to. Light pierces the wings of a dove ascending to flight as these remote recesses of the heart reveal themselves during the fast-rolling hours preceding dawn. See these tearless eyes of the no-luggage vagabond, the aimless slow-roaming witness. Like a shark dreaming of everywhere he is not.
This poem appeared in Vallum: Contemporary Poetry, issue 20:1, "Dreams vs Nightmares," Spring 2023
A Rose in Spring
For the most part forever is a scary thing—but this is not always the case. A tale we’re all long familiar with—but I’ve a feeling you’ll still crowd to hear, prick your ears like wolves in the early months. Could it be—another pup stumbling about in all this dark snow? Could it be—a friend to remind me that all these horrors of the mind are just that—dust in the house perturbing the light of life outside? Howling with rapture—but let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. This dog imagery is trite and I’m sick of it too. All I mean to say is no mother’s child can toil alone against these ills of the heart of which no soul is immune. Yes we’re all our own snowflakes and whatnot, but snow nonetheless. Melting. Dripping from whatever leaf we’d chance to land upon. Why are these simplest things the easiest to forget? Why so easy to love others and yet such a challenge asking to be loved? To love ourselves? I’ll leave it for the sages to chip away at and just relate what one had said to me: You were given a rose, my friend, not the roots.
This poem appear in Issue 2 of the Big Little Cities Zine.
Big Rain from a Small Cloud
Against my will and wholly ignorant of it the leaves are falling again. The sky floats by the glass. The grey sea rages under a grey sky dotted with crows sailing home. O to be soaring and knowing all. Made of clay but today I am sand being dragged back into the rage of its own creation. Holding on. For so many others it all seems so obvious—life is just one great striving against the shadows. The curse of the talented, then: the wheels are always turning. Don't jump while the train clamours on. Standing with my back to the falling sun I watch them now—the shadows—reaching out to their expiration, drowning in the dark, the light swallowing their source. And everything is exactly as it appears to be. There’s a set of prints in the sand leading out to the sea and not returning. Nothing is really hidden, nor has it ever been. Has it? In inane hours of the night I roam these dark roads and visit low places. Hollow hours, imploding silence. The skull is formed foredoomed then takes on the flesh, a vessel sailing off to a land it will never find. But to be awake when others are not—this at least has always been a great pleasure of mine.
This poem appears in the Spring 2023 issue of Ignation Literary Magazine.
We Used To Look Up
We used to look up at the pockmarked darkness and call it heaven. For every soul departed a star was born, the most northern one called desire. Our guide. Everybody seems to want to be wherever they’re not, including me. Travel the world, teacher said, and watch it get smaller. Cravings are like gravity and we’re all trapped in orbit. Last time I was in Athens somebody said there’s a couch waiting for me in Uruguay, but my coat of adventure hangs from a nail in the rain. They tell me it’ll dry off once I put it back on again, move around a bit. The breaching sun casts beams of dust across my study. Dust on my boots from roaming lonesome roads. Apartment windows are like polaroids of other worlds. A child stares down at me wondering, Why am I not you and you me? I’ve been here once before, I think, maybe in a dream. Dust to dust, perhaps, but what about in between? Just as a gun is designed solely for destruction, so too the pen for creation. And cartwheeling tumbleweeds in the street do not long for what is not, laboring to bring it forth into being. I wonder what type of fool had the notion to spin for fire. As a youth, was he plagued with wonder? In the morning before school would he tell mother he was sick with no symptoms to show? Every baby from their first breath is parent to their own demise. We should still care for who we used to be.
This poem appeared in december mag in 2021.
Caravan
Though their group is large they make no sound over the biting winds. And none feels like speaking after what had happened earlier. He feels they’re being followed, but says nothing. The desert fading into night is like a photo print dissolving back into its negative. Clouds spill over the moon like milk across a nickel on asphalt. Each gust of wind is like a papercut digging deeper into yet an older papercut. The masochistic flames lick the darkness that will soon consume them. All members of the caravan sit with a tiny image of the fire in their eyes, staring mutely in return as if in search of their own image hidden somewhere amongst all that heat. Later, winds will take the ash long before it has a chance to cool, and the child will hear his grandmother whisper a single word in her sleep.
Modern Times
Modern times in the city. Everyone is looking for love, even those who’ve already found it. Autumn leaves drift down from the boughs and their absence reveals a crescent moon huge and low on the cement horizon. A medium-sized dog leaps blindly, failing to catch a frisbee. A woman watches this from afar, baby clamped to her breast. In a coffee shop Yusef orders something new as he stares out at the people on the sidewalk, philosophizing on the difference between destination and direction, a reason unknowable and no reason at all. There’s been a cloudy image on his mind for some time now. All throughout the pensive winter he has made progress in his craft by his own definition of the word. Now, as the fences of time have finally begun to lean, with flute to chin he smiles. Tonight, he says to the others, tonight we do what gods do.
These poems appeared the April 2022 issue of Clackamas Literary Review.
Autodidact of Grief
In the long hours when dreams should be unfolding a child forced to grow too soon must labor to draw honey from a dry well under a facetious moon that pans slow as a lame searchlight. The ocean swells and retreats like the belly of an exhausted mother. Trees whine in the breeze like enormous slow-shutting doors or cats grieving in legion. And from that riverbank hut the lights across the water appear to her as though fond memories of a past life or the place where the dead have gone or what is the difference. All this life, she wonders, has it been but a trial or preparation? And until the world falls mute and the ocean dries and her heart becomes stone she will breathe patiently for a response.
This poem appeared in issue 1.3 of Untenured.
When I Was 21
I lived on a farm in the east, a sprinkler system my alarm clock. We and Us had been reduced to I, and I combed for truth among the green and brown isles, the spinning clouds. The soft snow drifting and landing in my hair. At night, ribbons of pitched fire rose into the black rain. I’d been wondering if the road ahead leads just where you choose it to, and what in this world you could call perfect. I’d been raised in a home of women with ears to listen, and my young head was still ablaze. Pierre—the strawberry farmer—said, Trust your wounds to one who knows what they’re doing. Your foe would kill you more than once if they could. And they will. I said, tell me how you know for certain you’re not also lost to the clutch of circumstance? He put his thumb between his eyes and barked. Remind me again, he said, is it or is it not the blank space between walls which we call home? The hands must toil, the face must sweat. But after a hard digging the harvest surely comes. And with that, he waddled on down the road into the rising moon and closed the door after him. It was as if he’d drawn my face and labeled it a self-portrait.
This poem appeared in Eunoia Review in 2021.
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