Take Heart

One of those days when you realize the best thing

about the day was the barista who made the espresso-

and-foam heart on top of your latte and said, this

is for you, which was enough to make you hurry out

the door before anyone could see what it had done to you.

Otherwise, the day was full of bigots and homophobes

and a royal flush of other –ists and –phobes, and a man

at the grocery who said something to the little girl

in the cart behind him in the checkout line singing

that Katy Perry song, and whatever it was he said,

it was enough to quiet her roar. What is wrong

with people? you say to your cat at the end of the day,

as you dump Grilled Liver & Chicken in Gravy Fancy

Feast into his bowl and scritch behind his ears

while you tell him about the barista and the heart

and the girl in the shopping cart, looking, I suppose,

for a little support, the lick of a rough pink tongue to say,

I don’t know about the others but this human is okay,

but who instead lifts one hind leg skyward and gets

to work, so that it comes down to the fleeting foam heart

skywritten across your coffee to stand between you

and the thousand swastikas, the Katy-haters, the night. 

(first published in The American Journal of Poetry, 2018)

Planned Obsolescence

Nature meant us to have just a few decades, time enough

for puberty and propagation and seeing the kids safely

onto a soccer team before we were eaten by a giant kangaroo,

saber-toothed cat, or fellow primate, or more slowly felled

by dengue fever or gingivitis. She could not have anticipated

sewer systems, antibiotics, sterile operating rooms, or

the many and varied uses we would put to the buried

remains of ancient life. Who could have guessed how many

of us would live long enough to die of natural causes,

to experience that closing cascade of systemic organ failure,

surrounded by loved ones and our collection of porcelain

corgis? Surely she must be appalled at the sight of our octo-

and nonagenarians dancing to Johnny Mathis, walker-to-walker

with the other residents of the Shangri-La Assisted Living

Senior Hospitality Center and Make-Your-Own froYo Bar.

Still, there goes my neighbor Norman, who made it on TV

for turning a hundred last year, and who, early in the morning

of every school day, dresses in his cargo shorts and high-vis

safety vest and walks down the street to the busiest crossing

in front of the elementary school, where he guides pods

of impatient human young across the street, telling them

to slow down, stop swearing, watch out for cars and zip up

their damn coats if they don’t want to catch their deaths.

(first published in Atticus Review, 2018)

Glaucoma

It starts small. First, maybe you fail to notice the blue
azalea bush that has been remarkable on the last corner
of your evening walk for thirteen years. And so it isn’t
there. Then it’s that stretch of new housing out 

by the airport that up and leaves the map as if a wash 
of bleach were bleeding in from the west. One day, 
when you’re not looking, one Indonesian island blinks out
and triggers a cascade through the other seventeen

thousand like a strand of Christmas tree lights going dark.
By the time you look around, continents are calving-off entire 
countries, which maybe join Atlantis in the Mariana
Trench and pick up where they left off or, more likely, turn

as barren and white as Great Barrier coral or the pods 
of belugas which, by the way, are no longer punting about 
in the Arctic, their melons having gone missing, along with 
the sea ice and, while we’re at it, the sea. What’s left,

at this point, is a solitary cistern of clear water, inexorably 
evaporating, leaving bathtub rings in the red desert rock, 
as it goes. Still, if you cup your hands around your eyes,
shutting out everything else, if you peer deeply into the dark 

water, refusing to avert your eyes, as if their lives depended
on it, or yours, you can see your grandchildren there, chasing 
a dog on a narrow islet of grass, oblivious to the truth that dawns 
on you at last, how they are all that is left of the world.

(first published in American Literary Review, 2018)

Taking Measures

 I wrap them like fine china in layers

of old newspapers and bubble wrap

and still I know that the moving man

will drop the box or hit a pothole

on that bad stretch of road heading

out of town and something will crack.

All spring I have watched song

sparrows readying their nest in the rotting

crotch of a birch tree, laying in twigs

and leaves and feathers, lacing it up

with string pulled from the canvas

deck chairs, only to have the arborist

take the tree down on a day I wasn’t there

to remove, first, the nest with its four

mottled brown-and-white eggs—

which needed to be done, he said,

to save our house from a windstorm

whose inevitable coming he foretold.

I still tiptoe past their empty rooms

at night, throw salt over my left

shoulder, batch the bad things

that pop up on my news feed into

groups of three, but leave my phone

in the other room at night, willfully

believing that bad news will wait,

that one can take one’s medicine

in the morning, that the sun will rise.

(first published in Bookends Review, 2017)