A Rose to Press

Illness smells out the trite like beagles with noses near to the ground -- like a mother who knows her daughter's been smoking in the bathroom downstairs a dozen walls away from her. Suddenly this narrowing of breakdown lanes, of space to roam, sidewalks cracking from the ice. Slippery sunsets, stretching winters, each hour of spring fresh popcorn to a starving duck. Truth becomes too short to hold -- like mustache trimmings in the sink, like bones that go brittle and snap, like hay that meets immutable rain. Don't we wish it didn't take a teapot growing cold and chipped Read more [...]

Mustard Seeds

I question the empty page like a moldy slice of bread -- it might have been a decent meal in someone else's hands. The clock records a passing hour. Still no verse worth printing out. A filthy kitchen floor sticks to my shoes like an uttered lie -- I flip through yesterday's mail, stacking bills in heavy bricks, thinking I'm an ad for grief, ought to get different life that dwells upon a butterfly. Our puppy slams the keyboard tray, pulls at my socks with rollicking teeth. Her tail wags east then west -- pointing out with clarity the aching light I'm missing in this clouded room -- Read more [...]

What Happens to the Fallen Leaf

I expect we will always argue about fixed conclusions of a chair -- that image of defeat so raw it could be hanging, stinking beef unabated by the wind. Call it fealty to dreams, to rivers drying as we speak -- if you guess I'll yield to rolling wheels with arioso grace, you've not met my real soul who thinks that even tortured legs are still a poem with missions in their syllables. You will say I have more strength than monuments of will I know. You will say that chancre is a cornered bird in rooms we never knew were there. And I will say I'm featherless, a brittle corpse that mourns Read more [...]

The Poolside Chat

Three women lounge beside a pool -- comparing scars and silently, the sizes of a spreading waist. Laughing at the family branches, reading stories for reprieve. Different brands of syllables to suit the weight of sorrow's cloth and longing, well, it hangs in sacks beneath the eyes behind their shades -- it hangs in every swaying elm. Children cackle in the water, race across the hot cement to blankets of their mothers' arms. Dancing like a moonbeam's stripe toward that grand chameleon, death, unaware that bodies are tenuous treasures at best. Denominators of the years Read more [...]

Clinging to the Caving Walls

The battle went flat like a candle pinched. One moment you were pale soap resting on a double bed, dwindling as our tears raged on. I'd read to you from hardbound books as if thin scrolls of verse you loved could break the silence rubbing against my quiet screams. A hospice nurse shut down the drip. I made her check your pulse at least a hundred useless times between my racking sobs. We'd clean and paint the haunted house as if a broom or brush could mitigate this hurt. My sister and I drew straws. The short one got your bathroom drawers; the long one got your greenhouse Read more [...]