Husker-Du Fire
Wednesday, June 12, 2019
Thursday, February 28, 2019
Compensation
The black birch was dying from
the top down,
so many branches having
already been removed
for safety that the
goldfinches no longer came
in the fall to hang upside
down and harvest seeds.
Still, the sparrows went to work
on a hole in the tree,
gradually widening it to nest
size, and I watched
several sets of hatchlings,
all bald heads and gaping
beaks, at first, then perching
for a week or two
like puffy dauphins on the
fence, and then gone.
One year the chickadees were
first to the hole,
defending it, making it more
spacious still. Other
bird couples came and went,
each doing a bit
of remodeling, as you do,
upgrading to stainless
steel appliances, maybe, or marble
tile. It was as if
they couldn’t help picking
away at it, like your old
aunt who knits as obsessively
as she once smoked,
filling whole rooms with afghans,
slippers, hats.
Each tenant planed away at the
walls, until one day
they punched clean through
cambium laths
and drywall bark, leaving the
home open to wind
now that would chill the eggs.
The nest lay vacant
for years, the hole like a
periscope eye in the stump,
until one summer when wasp
masons began
bricking up the walls, mixing
saliva into stucco,
subdividing, leasing studio
apartments, a vibrant
compensatory hum for the slowing
xylem and phloem.
Published in Broad Street, 2019
Published in Broad Street, 2019
Monday, October 15, 2018
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)
Tuesday, August 7, 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)
Thursday, July 19, 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.
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)
Thursday, January 4, 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)
Wednesday, November 15, 2017
There Ought to Be a Manual
It’s like the first time someone who is not
your mother sees you
naked. Because you don’t know, do you, if all
your parts
are in the right place, shaped and sized
appropriately, according
to convention?—because your mother would never tell you,
which means there you are, pulling down your
pants over
what might well be a preposterous ass. So, to
my point,
you don’t know, likewise, what to do, how to
be, at these grown-up
parties, so much depending on first impressions,
decisions
about where to sit, what to drink, how long and
loud to laugh
at pretty much everything, as far as you can
tell, whether anyone
has noticed the fear-sweat creeping up the
small of your large back
and pooling in environmentally catastrophic oil
spills under
each arm. Or how, when you leave the party ten
minutes
after arriving and return home, you confront, equally
unprepared,
the task of “putting down” your dog—will it be
like it is
for the Kentucky Derby winner who breaks his million-dollar
leg after crossing the line? or like the farmer
who takes his shotgun
and the children’s 4-H pig out behind the
barn?—this dog
who can only look up at you, these days, as you
come in the door,
who doesn’t pant anymore so much as rattle, who
has seen
your ass, listened to you laugh long and loud
at Julia Child
pummeling the pastry dough, who has a thousand
times taken you
outside for a little sun, and who has always given
it to you
straight—like yesterday, when he told you that
one of you needed
to grow a pair, and since you had taken his, it
fell to you,
he said, to figure out how it was meant be
done, how death
for one could be brought about, how going on,
for the other.(first published in Gloom Cupboard, 2016)
Tuesday, November 7, 2017
You Know This One By Heart
It will start as the sort of
love poem
you know by heart, with the
young
couple waist-deep in the
ocean, en-
twined, and then work its way
around
to a day at the park, throwing
frisbees to their corgis and
kids. Then,
not unexpectedly—you will have seen
it coming—the requisite scene
of vitriol
and recrimination. All you
will need
are a few details about who
was found
in whose pickup truck doing
what
with whom, and you could write
the lines yourself. Where the
poem
takes a turn, however, is when
we see
the man, years later, walking
in a forest
as if he knows it like the
back of his hand,
kneeling to see the tiny vines
of blue-
eyed marys growing alongside
the trail,
when all at once a great
horned owl rises,
so close the man’s hoary heart
nearly
breaks in his chest, beating
like wings.(first published in Black Fox Literary Magazine, 2017)
Thursday, October 19, 2017
Coming Out
When I put a quarter in the
table-top jukebox
for three songs by John
Denver, Darrell calls me
a wuss and dares me to try a
bite of the breakfast
special, calf brains and eggs.
I tell him that, unlike
some people I know, I don’t
need to order brains
from a diner—which I can get
away with
because he long ago tired of
pounding on me,
and anyway I’m paying for the
food, and the cigarettes
from the machine, and for
wherever we might
decide to go where there might
be girls to see us
smoke. Last week when I told
him I thought
I wanted to be a poet, he
looked at me the way
my father did when I told him
I was leaning
Democrat, or like my mother
when I came out
atheist—just keep praying to lord Jesus, dear—
I could see my words zipping
through Darrel’s
head like a hummingbird had
come in through a tear
in the screen door and really
wanted out now,
but in the end it was enough for him to blow smoke
in my face, make me swear to
god I still liked girls.First published in Pembroke Magazine
Monday, September 4, 2017
Anglerfish Love
I followed bioluminescent
deep-sea Google Maps to
find
you flashing your tawny
midriff, on which I
nibbled
playfully, read you bad
poetry
about two becoming one,
before latching on.
Best day ever
for a dude, right? freeloading,
hanging out in my underwear
night and day in the TV
room,
letting you have your way
with me from time to
time—
you know I could never resist
the sweet esca of your
illicium—
feed from your fridge, watch
Adam Sandler movies until
my eyes and even limbs
fell off.
But, baby, you don’t come around
much anymore, only to complain
about the beer bottles,
the sheen
of salt and vinegar
chips on my lips.
I see the way you walk
the red
coral, now, holding up your light
like a siren to every
passing sailor.
(first published in Hartskill Review, 2016)
(first published in Hartskill Review, 2016)
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