As Mourning Doves Persist

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   ...

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...

  When we spoke on the phone there were dominant background sounds, crickets here that    rhymed with the smoke alarm that went off in your living room and you couldn’t remember    the code to shut it down and last night a moment of rain and I lay in bed unsure if I should go outside   to set the orange bucket aside from the downpour to maintain the safe house there for the unidentified   protozoa, my husband called them, naiant in the unlikely habitat  - what I believe tadpoles   beside a yard where I have never seen frogs but perhaps it is the sludge cry that I seek   the sticky tar paper that lines my lungs and heart cavity weeping impending displacements, my father   who may never button up his favorite green shirt again  with philodendron etched on fabric nor walk    out to the lanai at the back of his house with his third wife  and we either joke or pretend we will take him   to the beach when we ...

  The admonishment at age 6 was this:  Pull your lower lip in, or an elephant  will come along and step on it .  My grandmother of the always clean,  passing the felt-bottomed collection plate, allowed no pout.  Sadness was for others with less, without silverware to eat. No picking at the peas or potatoes. My lip and lump    in my throat forbidden, hidden. Stick figures  populating a children’s book. Spine affixed with silver adhesive tape, a stringy makeshift mend, once belonging to my father, her most obedient son (Just swallow that ball of  irritable.  Good Manners Can Be Fun ) I defaced the aging pages,  scribbling my crooked name sloppily in pencil, and then rooted  for the tiny pachyderm in a blue star-less room   Nose-trunk growing like Pinocchio caught in what he wanted  to believe. That he was a real boy. That these elongated faces  make visible sense when we are lonely and no one is listening...