Therapeutic Massage

Her hands run down the hourglass of my back. Tracing the flare where burrowed absentee tension coagulates. Washboard. Bath water, Blackboard burdened with layers of letters and calculations never entirely erased.

We share answers to questions only asked by strangers who after four visits will never see one another again. She strikes a lighter, sucking oxygen from small glass cups that I cannot see, and attaches them to my back hovering above my bruised ribcage. Fascia ripples, letting down like a lithely inhabited village where our grandmothers still live, agile in their afterlives.

Her black hair is pulled back from her face. I really only know her voice now from a warm table in a narrow room where, face down on my stomach, my neck relinquishes to the kneading. The name she gives to the tight spring under my right arm just at the webbing of shoulder blade and first rib is wholly new to me. Swans, her therapeutic lyric. I try to swallow the minute fountain that pools in my mouth, slack jawed, breath expelling after too many years.

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Vessel

Inside I imagine puckered cups of butter cookies nested in paper that releases a sigh But instead there may be fiction within wishes never reciprocated Playbill of redundant arguments One black glove found fraying This vessel on an emptied table solo temptation is labeled with another’s name Guarded initials as if carved in melting snow A tool unsuited to the task of prying open Not yet valentine

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 ...

Broken Bits and Mending Tape

S acred stones roll around on the floor of my car, carried in over years of scavenging. Pocketed. Parceled. Placed on dashboard or grave. Markers of present coloring past. The sun bathes the windshield just so and the secret messages written in mud or snow show themselves for the innocent blessing that they are. I walk into this side street café with my bruised heart in a purple and black satchel and am greeted by a circle of banjo players and one free seat against the window. Chairs like we inhabited in elementary school when things were still made of wood, grafted together at the corners with metal, corners rounded and smooth. We kept our notes in desks and lockers, wrote whispers of names we adored on the plain brown wrappers around our math books. Took broken bits and mending tape, carted cassette songs of guitar players who have since died or changed their names. Like mantras, directions to the river canyon where we could picture the rough rope as magical swi...

As Mourning Doves Persist

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