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Brand New  

September 16, 2025
In the first days when I was rabid and rangy and dead quiet and orange Crush Over pebble ice was beyond belief. When I hiked Bear Mountain on Valentine’s Day  In Jordan 4’s held together by gaffer tape. The world that I could touch. The big blue  Face of the sky that I could kiss. Come to Pathway,...

Fresh Fade 

September 16, 2025
Grant isn’t great at cutting hair, but he is gentle.  I sit down and let him do what he wants. The light  In March is white and cold, and Luca and Gianni are  Waiting their turns, shirtless and shivering, we try to be men  Among men. At first, Grant steers my head tentatively, Using his fingertips to guide me, now...

Dryad

September 16, 2025
That trees seem souled, yes. Less plain is what a tree nymph would want with a woman’s skin.  The hunter’s camouflage, the soldier’s thatch cape, the bark Daphne grew to thwart  a god’s caress—say what you will   about their purposes—  for metamorphosis to run  in that direction at least  makes perfect sense.  But why an oak, its mind  an owl, its larynx a wren,...

The Button Coat

September 16, 2025
                             Button Coat, Gift of Mrs. Cecil Cowell                              Grand Rapids Public Museum  Not septuplets, a paisley of embryos in the womb, and not matches in a book,  an incendiary choir—  my parts are not a brood waiting to be born or undone,  each a short-lived excuse  for its own tongue of fire.   If they are a brood, my parts are a world:...

Another Extinction

September 16, 2025
Death makes names songless.  We lose a warbler in November and  December holds the silence.  Under a full moon a shock of lichen  writhes and we press  our fingerprints into its growth.  We look through blue forest  into its parking lot, loud  as the birds that used to sing.  The forest is silent.  Death hears only death— who names us.  

The Juvenile Street Cleaning League  

September 16, 2025
was invented, once upon a time, in New York, at the end of the nineteenth century.  Network of immigrant children, on the Lower East Side, in white caps.   Who walked the streets, reported on those who littered.    Who kicked bottles and apple peels to the gutter to keep sidewalks clean.  Who were the eyes, ears,...

red angel shivers 

September 16, 2025
                                        –carnelian  shadows play between cracks  salt-scarlet    shell-sweeper              moss-fruit     silver-first  shadows twist into webs      cosmos-thick    blooming  into layers of mystery     white heat               shines from the stone’s inside    leaking   into edges    rain diadem   poison       bud   peak of eternal flies  there is otherworldly beauty beneath us              points of starlight    a green eye sleeping   within the mountain    ...

glitter fangs

September 16, 2025
–rosasite & hemimorphite of copper oxide zinc        disrobes for the golden light beneath the oak tree    scraps       of otherworldly remnants falling each leaf contains symbols    claw- letters       blue & orange at the edges the shimmer of life among death silicates whip      familiar tongues of fire black       orange       turquoise    gray      & white shimmer...

Self-Portrait in a Scorched Forest

September 16, 2025
I didn’t ask to be trapped in a matchstick castle, a natural labyrinth with a canopy- roof and huge roots curled like the fists of men. When I was born, I was planted, an uncongenial husk, flaxen-haired with a hay-fever face. For boys like me history’s a cleave the ax intention leaves in the trunk...

Trash Academy 

September 16, 2025
is nine classes taught on Zoom, the history of waste management  in New York, and I fill my notebook.  I write everything down.  We learn that the story of trash is a collection of lies —  “Iron Eyes Cody” the crying Indian in Keep America Beautiful   was Italian American.  Keep America Beautiful was funded by Coca Cola, Nestle,...

Thursday at the Threshold: Repetition 

September 16, 2025
I’m back at the man-made lake listening  to the squirrels shuffle in the crisp leaves, & the sound of jays overhead,  calling out to one another. To get here I walked past the apartment your father lived in when we met & another we looked at together  on Ocean Avenue. There, we thought of you,...

Numbers Nightclub, Montrose.

September 16, 2025
We were playing games with cherries or at least I was, we wereterrified or at least I was, I traded in my white Russian for youramaretto sour, my old-fashioned for your Manhattan, everythingwas different now. You don’t dance; I can’t not. My therapist smilesgently in her chair and says, it’s magical, attraction, when it happens,to...