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Poetry
Poetry
FaceTime
I held an iPad for Miguel as he lay in his hospital bed / so he could see his family sheltered at home. / He was suffocating, this man who at the worst of times / would only tell his loved ones, Me siento bien. / All around us the equipment of life / and death was buzzing, humming, beeping, / a stubborn choir of mockingbirds.
December 2021Poetry
The Wedding Gift
From the moment Ashlee asked me to be a bridesmaid, / I understood what my wedding gift needed / to be. It wasn’t the set of tumblers / I shipped her from 14th Street, daffodils and dandelions / climbing the sides. It wasn’t helping her angel of a mother / practice her speech, making pencil marks for pauses / and every deep breath. No, my gift / to Ashlee started when she told me Cate from college / would be a bridesmaid, too.
December 2021Poetry
Steady Daylight
Today in heaven / my father turned 105. / Finally working steady daylight, / he’s got it knocked: / eight to four, / double time and a half, / no asbestos, / no shoveling slag / on the open hearth, / no boss, / thirteen weeks vacation annually, / kingdom come. / The union up here takes zero shit.
November 2021Poetry
Jewish Community Center Entrance, July 1971
It’s dark and I don’t feel / at all well and my mother / will soon arrive to take me / home and the overripe aroma / of the hedges with the tiny / white flowers is making me / want to throw up but I’m / not alone because a fellow / counselor-in-training, / my first friend who is a boy, / has left the camp sleepover / to wait with me
November 2021Poetry
Fifteen Strokes Of Luck
The first was that I was no longer in pain; I could sleep. / The second was that I was finally able to love: all my life I had been more or less shut. / The third was that I lived near a pond. Watching the mallards dunk made me laugh. I was happy looking at dragonflies and even their empty exoskeletons, their shells shaking a little in the wind.
November 2021Poetry
A Few Days After My First Vaccine
Walking by the lake, I lose an earring / and don’t even notice it at first, / overwhelmed as I am / by the strangeness of everything.
October 2021Poetry
Intensive Outpatient
On our way back from a Mother’s Day celebration in Newport Beach / my sister turned to me & said, Have you ever thought about treatment for your / eating disorder? For years the only eating disorder in the house was hers.
October 2021Poetry
Almost Cha-Cha
I tell people that when I was born, my mother / was on drugs, and so she named me Brett. / But what I don’t tell them is that she almost / named me Charlotte and wanted to call me / Cha-Cha.
October 2021Poetry
It’s Friday Afternoon In The Florida State Penitentiary And The Men Read Poetry
and Ronnie says Robert Hayden got / it right, a whipping be like that — “the face that I no longer / knew or loved” — damn, that’s it, right there and / Ronnie doesn’t blame his mama for beating him so bad, but / maybe she could have kept her pipe in the car and then maybe / he never would have ended up in a foster home
August 2021Poetry
The Buttonhook
My son sprinted to each traffic light / in his black hat and dark Sabbath suit / while the elderly congregation two miles away / waited for him to help lead morning prayers.
July 2021
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