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September 30, 2026
Block Poem I learned early that the secret is always turn left, every chance you get, and you’ll solve the labyrinth. There’s a minotaur, of course, but he’s mostly starved for texture, wants to pet your unraveled yarn more than rend your flesh. And that makes perfect sense. Fear is practically built into these walls,...

If you didn't know

September 30, 2026
For Darlene Chaney, sister of Cornelius Taylor, crushed in his Atlanta, Georgia tent home by a “large earth-moving machine” on January 16, 2025. And for M, mother of J.  In 1969, in Portland, Oregon there was a summer ritual of burning out the tent caterpillars that enveloped the neighborhood street trees in white gauze architecture....

From cartoons for a poem “Among a bar cabal”

September 30, 2026
⛭ Among a bar cabal of aesthetes, one likens bodies in Gazan dirt to Michelangelo’s unfinished slaves. Another read that black holes were like blown glass, a bottle with an infinitely long neck and enormous if invisible belly. The interior is larger than the exterior. These beasts chiacchierando this way, while draining long stem glasses....

Ornithology

September 30, 2026
—in memory of Charlie Parker, seventy years gone “The beauty of mathematics only shows itself to more patient followers.” —Maryam Mirzakhani That morning before I left for work, my son James asked me, Can people fly?  He can, I said.  James was sitting cross-legged on the floor holding his ankles and looking up at Kenderick Lamar’s video “Alright” playing on...

Breathing Room

September 30, 2026
Oxygen is a metaphor is an element of mystery: O, oh   dilating its two pupils. Please.  I’ve been practicing forgiveness, rehearsing it in my room.  It’s okay, I say, if it doesn’t really happen. It’s okay if I just chop up the bodies   in my head. I mean of my enemies. But it’s my head floating  in my head in a pool...

brother

September 2, 2026
brother, one day we’ll be stardust. for now let’s dance at the durbar.brother, come closer, i’m tired of your face crossed off by fence, this metal between us, bold like a headline, cold as a blizzard’s eye.o’ brother, may i let my honesty slip—? my arms miss the length of your neck. i ask the...

Winter: LIV

August 26, 2026
For the wedding guestsfor the tinfoil that glitters on neighbors’ apartment floors for the way cabbage so confidently sproutsabove the ox’s skull for the wind’s film reelthe piano’s accompaniment all winter I envy the moonlike I could pin the tail of the waves’ withdrawal there

Winter: LIII 

August 26, 2026
On the moon I walk among fallow pastures this concrete bunker’s a border   the longer I stay anywhere the more quickly my thoughts migrate  away from meat the empty ranch house   caution tape riots the dog tracks are wilder than dogs 

Winter: LI 

August 26, 2026
There is a Great Year, whose winter is a great flood and whose summer is a world conflagration. In these alternating periods the world is now going up in flames, now turning to water. —Heraclitus, On Nature  A yard like another year’s gardena plum tree like a plum tree, sparrows like flocks of leaves scattering as planes pass...

Everything’s Fine at The Greenbrier!

August 26, 2026
Sunday, 3 September 2023 I am staring at an incinerator for human bodies, fantasizing about climbing in for a nap. But the cast iron door—a squeeze, but I’d fit, I think—is mounted far too high up, at chin level. Perhaps to discourage me from throwing myself in.  This place thinks of everything.  I’m deep underground in...

The Five Remembrances

August 26, 2026
about the last day the continents touched—and there wasa last day—or the last night a chunk of earth split off, became the moon —“Land Masses,” Jennifer Martelli (1962-2025) Amble in one direction—there’s no loop trail in these woods. Aging’s about bureaucracy, its tedium, and border crossings that close behind you, and the cusp of nothing:...

DESTROYING ANGEL (AMANITA VIROSA)

August 26, 2026
Often confused for meadowor horse or button. Sometimes confused by the veil concealingthe universe of my young self so a future can grow upto destroy it: the volva another name for ruins.Some call it a cycle of foresight or historic recurrence (thoughthe organed dome looks like foreskin to me).I call it my life insurance nightmare...