Poem: One star

That shining eidolon of my desire: I taste it, roll it on my tongue, do not swallow. Curled-tail coward, the body hollowed out. I shove the words back in with a fist. This: I tilt my chin to the wayward stars see only one, wonder if I’m going blind. Maybe the light is trickling out […]

Poem: Planting day

Green Girl, bless these fragile shoots, these weak stems aching toward the light. Even the rain lays too heavy, the patterning droplets cold and shattering. You know the equation: fresh from death and newly enfleshed, as we — seed-cracked — always are at the start, the end, the journey’s unmapped turns from dawn to dawn. […]

Poem: Face full of flames

A fire after the blue flash of liquor flares and fades — I was leaning in, the blaze whitely seared my eyelashes. He laughed then. I said nothing; I had come to expect these cruelties of people we call friends. I’ve learned to shrink away from those who would burn me but you never know […]

Poem: Drum song

Beat the drum: These long years I have bowed falsely humble — I have gathered myself from each fall and shattering, I have made a song and called it a life. Beat the drum! I don’t want diminishment into forever, a weakening pulse. Let me flame out with the break rhythm, let me dance myself […]

Poem: The lost moon

They say someday we shall lose the moon: inch by inch the drift from our shared orbit. Who can say when he first slunk away, took that first inch then resolved on a second? We don’t remember the slight, what careless dart first sparked this determined distancing. It’s not the place of the moon to […]

Poem: Couldn’t choose sides

The war drew us apart, two waves in that fictional sea teeming with fish and chariots. You say I must learn to hate the correct people, scrub the soil clean, hens sacrificed to quell the disease. And yet: here is a body the same as my body, a skin that has known loving, a fear […]

Poem: Arrow

The tongue is an arrow: We draw it back then simply open when we’ve chosen our mark. Elf-shot stroke-shot, they said satires could raise boils on a king’s face — reddened as sloe-dye, the words let fly. Kama, you can tip them with roses and passionflower, heart-thumping to the target. You can tip them with […]

Poem: Stains

I don’t want to consider the rain tonight only how we extract the penalty from the kind as the wicked walk unfettered. How we stone the saint for the slightest of lapses and ignore the stain of crime on a king. There’s something reprehensible we find in a half-word, an imperfect gift, a lack of […]

Poem: The heart as a weapon

I cannot yet love my enemies: love the will that breaks me, love the fist and the sting, the dust and the insult matted in my hair. I cannot love the heart as a weapon which crushes love. The saints say this is a deficiency in me. The fox says nothing but slips bush to […]

Poem: All good things

Would I shine up the coin of your worth pay it back to you for all that I’ve seen: When I shivered in court, you sat behind and gave me the gift of your witness. After long years, I will give you mine: All good things, John; I would unshackle you from the chains of […]