Skip to main content

Return


               
Never mind letters to the dead.
What of missives written to the distant, transparent living? 
Questions to distracted mothers who whistle. Regrets 
to thought-furrowed fathers. These
are the forgotten, sweet tooth promises, piñatas
and childhood exhalations.

Old yellow pencils chewed to a scribble – I miss you –
longing that fails to find anyone, anywhere. Cousin
on an East Texas oil rig. West Coast brother in a band. 
Sister who swears she is happy. But adjectives spill,     
            bruises,
            sticky midnight-blue paint
            poured down your windshield.

The mystery of a boyfriend who when broken
sets fire to things.

Remember the inky tension of ash that smudges
your fingers when you reach in to align 
typewriter ribbon.

Remember the cool metal return and the sound
of carriage that rings a fresh new line.

Begin again...

 (from The Shape of Caught Water)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Open Mic, Cafe Babar

I remember arriving, not the prettiest but appealing  to certain bards in the back room, entering through  the Castro Valley corner door, walking the postage stamp sized  Cinzano bar curated by a man from Detroit who named  his establishment after a certain French elephant in a children’s book I arrive with budding consciousness around politically correct solidarity for disheveled neighbors, entering the cigarette lit night rising to tin siding ceiling to floor thumping insistence   Bruce and Joie and David and Laura and John, their ash and sweat accumulating as I waited patiently for my place on the crumpled sign-up sheet   Today, three decades later, I sit in a Santa Fe gallery named simply Here, and a poet reads to us of roadrunners and a bear and  a continuation of the call for preservation of our environment There is an otherworldly hum outside the window of leaded glass The owner sidles up behind me and pushes the fr...
Post a Comment
Read more

Shameless Early Promotion

My poetry book, The Fiction of Stillness, is available for pre-order now on Barnes and Noble. Official release date August 1st, 2024. Here's a taste: ... The table is smooth and round              symmetric         The chairs are haphazardly placed at the end of this day      I have breast cancer I say into the receiver   [communities must] pool resources   How to produce the sounds of the imaging                report into sentences that resonate with months of postponement weighty contrast on my right side   computing and comparing IM ratios for greater insight                          not sufficient to prove the efficacy of screening   ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Disarmed, for T.C.

On my back on the table in this your calm room             you caress my ankles and will my body tributaries  to rise up and meridians to exhale  Your knowledge like pulling taffy with buttered             hands   Your strength redirects my body’s river  which you lift and stretch       Then you place a wafer of a small white pillow over my eyes             that I might entirely succumb     to your warm hands draping  like weighted blankets over each of my resting shoulders    With intention    drifting toward chest      measuring every              underground hillock in these my pliable appendages...
Post a Comment
Read more