Poetry

  1. Brookland Blues

    My bare feet hit the pavement of the sidewalk, hard, heart pounding, going somewhere, going nowhere? It’s cold. Below freezing in February. There’s glass all over the sidewalk, shattered like the squares of a crossword puzzle. The sudden pain in my lower back causes me to stumble, but there’s no…

  2. Seconds

    We share leftover spaghetti on the floor I spill sauce on my tights and beer on your rug. I apologize  but you shoo it away— the whole night is an apology for the body, the fugue of self-hatred  descending, the marriage of you and me and her. She hangs heavy…

  3. Whole

    Mom I love you. I’m sorry we don’t get along better. Why have you always been so far away? I need you. I need your kindness and affection. I need your encouragements and reassurances. I need you to tell me everything is okay and mean it. I need you to…

  4. Stephanie in Bloom

    The last time we were together you held me down, squeezed my wrists until purple roses bloomed. There’s only space to write about us in the margins now. The world has become more fractured, more confused. My grief is my art. My gift is my pain. I wrap it in…

  5. My Blackbird Heart

    mother i have been looking for you  in photographs from my childhood.  i see pictures of me alone aloof  never secure.  look closer  i am contained, living inside the aviary you built  for my blackbird heart soaring only as high as you deemed  seeing the world from the bottom of…

  6. One Week in July

    Aujourd’hui, maman est morte — Albert Camus I. Forty Minutes to Goodbye You drive the familiar roads home but there’s nothing  familiar about them this time: home is a fleeting place.  You drive faster, wanting to put it all behind you  wake up 20 years later instead, not knowing the…

  7. American Sunrise

    The things we do in secret to prepare for the Apocalypse  I have always known the ending carry the same evil inside my body injected by my ______’s penis five or six years old the same evil Uncle Sam is pumping into your children  I demand awakening through the  gateway…

  8. Heaven is Blurry

    Heaven is blurrylike the window far off in the porcelain’s reflection  promises of peace like the beat of your heart  murmuring its song in my ear lulling the body back to life.

  9. A Living Sacrifice

    You asked whether All the king’s horses And all the king’s men Could ever put Stephanie back together again Sometimes that’s the point of healing And sometimes it’s not Every system is different They say I run a boarding house for divergent emotions  Inside my body No matches, sharps, or…

  10. A Woman’s Body

    you think it will never happen again you step off the shore you are vanishing while around you the darkness coming down a woman’s body called spring floating around in the darkness your soul won’t listen so you relax  you don’t fight it anymore your throat swells as it beats…

  11. Experience

    to begin again this time knowing what we do now a quiet hope shards of light in Mason jars playing childhood playing June the scream always dying in your throat when nights were long lying at the top of the stairs listening for it to be over and then  Portrait

  12. But You Don’t

    for Christmasyou can have a raincheckan IOU for the things we’d doif you felt anything at all for me. Portrait credit: Nelson Jaimes

  13. A Spinning Wheel

    Sometimes it doesn’t matter what you’ve done, what you didn’t do, what you look like, what age you are, any of it. Nothing matters at all. You have no control. Your parents don’t love you. No one loves you, not the actual you, the scared child, the terrified adult. The…

  14. Placeholder

    Only the wrens dare get close
land on the table
puff out their chests
observe and flit
flit and observe  Their activity contrasts your lethargy
soaking up the slanted rays of the
 Autumn sun
different than before.  You are here now like you were then
only you guess at the…

  15. Soul Moves West Upon Death of Body

    “In Abenaki tradition, souls move west upon the death of the body.” You used to dream, big open spaces and the mountains stretching out forever. The west. Always the west. It was your first love. Where you got married. The ocean, blue expanse, the cliffs and switchbacks, Redwoods reaching high…

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