SELECT POEMS

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A Graft for Time

(First published in Querencia Press’s Not Ghosts but Spirits, Vol. 1)

 

I grafted a fleck of your jawbone to the root of a hawthorn tree.

 

You grew within its spindled branches,

and instead of alveoli, bore clusters of red berries;

instead of teeth, hard needles of umber

for protection.

 

When spring came, your tongue split into a million soft, white blossoms,

and you released them into the air;

a silent chorale drifting lightly

above the breeze.

 

Purple finches took refuge in the thickets of your lungs,

and in fresh nests of twigs and twine,

bore sweet and songful young

warbling tales of the tenderness and tenacity 

of root and bone.

 

I grafted a fleck of your jawbone to the root of a hawthorn tree.

 

This way, they will call you sacred, 

and never cut you down.

​

A Song for Asteria

(First published in Wild Roof Journal, Issue 17)

 

A comet
reflected in the sea
flies at the speed of Sailfish,
yet, in the sky, almost motionless it hangs,
the earth moving around it
as if to hold it in the universe.

Then, gravity inhales,
and it plunges to the deep,
and in its supernova
bursts into a million jewels,
and illuminates the ocean
for Cronos.

The afterglow of a watery grave:
aurora in the underworld.
 

The timeless,
sleepless Elysium 
of tides,
and moon,
and salt,
and stars,

 

forever glistening with the broken light

of a dying celestial queen.

​

Birth of the Cyclades

(First published in Querencia Press’s Not Ghosts but Spirits, Vol. 1)

 

The planets,

swirled in glass paper weights

press down

giving gravity to guilt

compacting the sea’s lungs

as she folds away from rising land

sucking the sea into tide-pools and caverns.

 

On the shore,

tides pull on air

casting wave spritzes

upon jagged volcanic rocks

in small spittle-filled gasps.

 

She remembers breathing in the saline thick with sea dust,

plankton swirling around her lungs,

soaking into her alveoli.

 

Tiny creatures churn in acid and blood,

in salt-thickened veins

inside her heart, brain, lungs.

 

This necromancer of dreams

with hands that once held a universe—

its fantasies, and its nightmares—

opens her legs and heaves out silt and diamonds and shipwreck

and lays in the estuary, recovering.

 

The salt-burn on her parched lips

is testament to the inner devastation

of learning to build land with her own bones:

an offering in stardust and defiance. ​