To write love poems when this world’s a mess
is like, depending on your point of view,
finding jasmine on the moon—an excess
of joy where all is bleak—or dreams of blue
sky at night, of food in famine…
We are all mourners now, our clothes
funeral shrouds we tear off our backs
when the time comes (and it will come);
in one pocket we carry brushes for tidying
the graves we stumble on in schools, churches,
nightclubs, concerts, grocery stores, streetcorners…
We spill talk like blood—O, I cherish you!
—but we cannot sustain the sentiment,
so we spill blood like blood, a kind of coup
against ourselves; no, I never meant
you harm, just want what’s best for my children
I can’t decide anything these days: sonnet or free verse;
to read on the couch or spend my son’s brief nap putting
away dishes as if dishes could ever stay clean; hope or
despair…
If home’s a castle
the mice have dethroned you, dear—
my heart has no queen…
I’ve had my head in the clouds so long
I don’t know how to climb back to my body.
In dreams my head is buried in the sand
and I make no effort to lift it.
When I was your age I suffered from acne, too,
was warned that if I got bad grades, dropped out,
spent too much time on poems, the sky would come
crashing down.
Bad news blares from every stamen, every mouth, every
passing car and leaf blower. I am coated in dust. It has
been too long since I left this spot. How do trees do it?
Do they too grow stiff and restless
“When you attack us, you will see our faces. Not our backs, but our faces.” – President Volodymyr Zelensky Beneath a Bougainvillea-laced trellis I read of war and war and war when I am startled by a sound deep and […]
No one is to blame for anything anymore.
Or is it that everyone is to blame for everything?
Maybe the world has gotten too small: so many billions
of us, incomprehensible to ourselves, let alone
one another, crowded together