The Age of Divestments
“To play in poetry’s fields, we must resign / to empty ourselves day after day, / night after night, sorrow after sorrow, / into nothingness, into flute music / from an instrument in skilled hands, / a weaver of spider silk.”
Interpersonal Intimacy
“I note They are / not common integers / but together, a unique fraction.”
Beneath St. Sebastian in Urbino
“as though truth and beauty / were so simple, as though such ancient suffering / were so necessary, as though there were nothing / more to this legend of violence and faith.”
The Microplastics in Me are the Microplastics in You
“A man stalked me through the forest yesterday. / There were three mass shootings yesterday. / Imagine anything else (it’s okay if we all do it).”
a love poem
“Dear God! / I pray this fire doesn’t warp me. when I start to / write love poems. without remembering my / brother.”
Dream Canto
“And then went down, like Odysseus. And Pound, / of course, to neither docks nor hell-chair, captive / in slumber’s vortex, weaponless, spiraling / to a crag-toothed island where one-eyed giants / roam, T.S. Eliot whines, and editors / issue red ink warrants.”
I Have Never Been Able To Write
“Now I will write no more, I’ll merely jeer. / Jeer even Anatole France himself”
Humboldt Park
“the Retriever sprints across the fields, clutching / the ball in its jaw, / not harsh to look at. to stare into / the sun on the horizon line.”
The Igbo word for death without the ‘w’ means joy
“He speaks in Igbo / so that the word for death rather comes out as joy. / I’m so happy this morning, I have death-joy in my hands, he beams.”