~ after Mercedes LópezI've come to love the milky taste of tea with no actual milk in it, and the tang of salt in the air on dry daysin the mountains. What are the scaffolds on which we build if not the ghosts of magnificent cities, whose blueprintssycophants and tyrants tried bu … | Continue reading
art to hang ash for dinner tea to write letters home to trouble | Continue reading
the pen and I making things up we doubt the time that comes in secret for a miscarriage or the song of a swan | Continue reading
Human: mid-15c., humain, humaigne, "human," from Old French humain, umain (adj.) "of or belonging to man" (12c.), from Latin humanus "of man, human," also "humane, philanthropic, kind, gentle, polite; ... in part from PIE *(dh)ghomon-, literally "earthling, earthly being," as opp … | Continue reading
open the knives of my heart to rust blooming like a sunset | Continue reading
Fortune can be a fickle lover, can be a beggar standing outside the gate in blood-stained rags, waiting to turn the tables on you. It can be a miser who keeps an eye, two feet, two hands on his hoard of coins because he thinks the world is only out to impoverish him. The sun … Co … | Continue reading
putting my phone away the plushness of the moss at its greenest now at the end of a hard winter a butterfly dances past like a lost carnival float the naked trees sway gray and weather-eaten i find a habitable hush in the shade of a pine though from time to time a moan interjects … | Continue reading
The trains of Norfolk Southern rumble past the new cafe. It's the same line that carried vinyl chloride in 2023, when something overheated and 38 cars derailed on the edge of East Palestine, Ohio. Think of the rain that must have hissed and crackled in the aftermath. Of dark plum … | Continue reading
in order that I may have order I sort and fold old news like a king with a black pen for a speech made by the world | Continue reading
watch on YouTube When I get high I go low Tell every bad joke that I know Submitting to gravity I succumb to depravity But at least I’m not doing blow * For some reason, this bit of nonsense popped into my head the other morning, and not knowing what else to do with it, … Continu … | Continue reading
"...you are not as heavy as the cup of earth, not placid as is the cup of water, not turbulent as is the cup of air..." ~ on the Four of Cups, Rider TarotIn the card, the man seated crisscross under a tree wears a mildly petulant expression. A hand emerges out of a cloud, … Conti … | Continue reading
rummaging and tearing sorting the night into moth or wisp a mad first visit | Continue reading
The mascot of my school is a lion; a monarch,to be exact. Meaning king, the creature who sitsatop the food chain in the wild. Except its statue on the quad has no cojones; just a rough undersurface of concrete. Is this departure from anatomical correctness intentional? A conserva … | Continue reading
A personal selection of posts from the Poetry Blogging Network and beyond. | Continue reading
doing business all in one thin city with no pen the office of tomorrow | Continue reading
Everyone has something to say. While this is true, not everything saidmakes it into the news or the archive. All night, the noisy congress of frogs; the screeching of possums and owls. Who conducts their decorum, who launches a 24-hour filibuster? Where does it come from, the aud … | Continue reading
A personal selection of posts from the Poetry Blogging Network and beyond. | Continue reading
the music of swans over the house and he with no wing his great body in pain refusing to go | Continue reading
In Artemisia's painting, completed in 1612 when she was only 20, Judith beheads the invader-general, assisted by her maid. Sometimes I forget that the artist is not the woman she portrays in this scene, faceresolute above the blade that's already severed the arteries in his neck. … | Continue reading
I increased myself in a picture the night comes with me like a nest if I have a heart I may reckon myself a god | Continue reading
"...for him it was not an important failure" "Musée des Beaux Arts," W.H. Auden They may have never been wrong about the indifference of people and animals, the banality of evil and suffering— but what if at all did they know about its opposite, joy; of howit must have felt to le … | Continue reading
praise your followers for their taste in hatreds they'll need them when it's white knuckle time | Continue reading
we found god in the air a hanging pear a happy accident done killing and robbing we are all now new at the grief grace brings | Continue reading
thin house in a glass country books and lips on a par | Continue reading
All day, her memories rake hard ground in search of lost gems, in search of veins that might lead to a heart of ore. Or they cluster like raucous birds in the morning and sing off-key, like children learning a melody by rote. She opens the shoe closet,hunting for a pair to cover … | Continue reading
Valentine's Day her formerly held hands each of them so poor and thin but able to count money by a hard bed | Continue reading
music comes and I sing out my way may be to make it up and I have all this contrivance to burn I have seen plain as night the queen of bohemia | Continue reading
of a life of grace. But she wobbles on one leg, trying to assume an attitude of balance. In the distance, two ships navigate a rough sea. Neither one has sent help signals yet. In another life which is merely another version of this one, she regards the growingbrightness beyond t … | Continue reading
No, the dark hasn't lifted yet. But here in this coastal part of the south, the daytime hours are still streaked with rain, meaning snow never crystallized enough to make the thickest, whitest blanket that might obliterate reminders of the crudeness of the world. No matter, it's … | Continue reading
is the afternoon road my reward out of work wishing I could be a wing in expectation of a coming night | Continue reading
We are tired, I am tired. Every dayis exhausting, isn't it? I'm thankfulfor anyone and everyone who's fighting mightily for our shared rights— to food and clean water and air, the fair reward of our labor, homes whose floors we'll sweep, where we can go to bed and rest with no fe … | Continue reading
a ring needs no mind to marry a home no mind to age I found no mind to compose so I gaze on swans | Continue reading
Years later, she remembered how inconsolablythe baby cried, how nothing could soothe except bouncing the mattress nonstop. She'd lockboth of them in the room, away from othersdisturbed by the wail of misfortune issuingout of the mouth of one so young. But was it indeed misfortune … | Continue reading
A personal selection of posts from the Poetry Blogging Network and beyond. | Continue reading
a fuller clock before time going in our arms us folk in our never considerable night | Continue reading
Lord's day and I am talking her out of her clothes for some air for prayer | Continue reading
Yeah why not. Let's go somewhere in a dark automobile at the speed of dreaming, purpose or no purpose. Sometimes, like now, I get tired of pondering the sustainability of survival as a kind of heroism. How long did you say it took the Praetorian guards to deliver the heads of the … | Continue reading
out of the old coal hole the colliers done with work walk in the dark home to another hill | Continue reading
Orion festoons the bare and crooked branches of a black walnut the light of the crescent moon is as weak as an old man’s piss from over the ridge the interstate highway roars and thunders it’s tranquility with jake brakes the moon passing behind contrails for a moment i too long … | Continue reading
The stump of a tree cut down years ago, finally softened, has become host to myceliaSometimes the smell of grilled meat floats over these housesOn the news tonight, hundreds of dairy cows infected with avian fluMy eye doctor tells me the names of chickens she keeps— Betsy, Trixie … | Continue reading
I and thou my parrot Lord our joy so heavy I cannot tell what to do with what I do my natural aptness to any cross | Continue reading
i wake in the dark to blow my nose lob the wadded-up tissue in the direction of the waste basket and hear it go in with a soft double knock i lie back in triumph but sleep has fled the oil furnace rumbles to life down in the crawl space it shares with hibernating animals | Continue reading
Dear intermittent constriction beneath the leftside of my ribcage, sometimes you feel bird-like, and sometimes like a fish in a transparent bowl. Sometimes you have the gloss of a ripe summer cherry. Sometimes I detect a roughorange flash, a fin flailing without direction, a poor … | Continue reading
music in my cellar my work on words exact and exacting all in one web | Continue reading
springtails on the snow at the base of an oak who needs wings when you can jump it’s usually enough to flummox the spider stalking across the snow in her bare legs as if at a funeral for the last rose while the wine of fellowship propels such epic leaps | Continue reading
Who chose the name begining with the letter Z for my mother? And who chose to name my real mother after the crescent moon? Growing upas they did during the war, they livedduring a time of great frugality; and sothe extravagance of their names is bothamazement and mystery to me. T … | Continue reading
the gardener is a hand moving to write in the ground given to a garden my wife and I lying still | Continue reading