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.
(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)