Better Get Back (to Chelsea)
Waist
here in our
resistance powder-
kegged
makeup
undid it:
magic of
sunlit
road
on her face
just me
our lives between
That lizard smile
walling down
defending me
against the subway
like
like
I was only running
from the winter
that’s all
Not that
together
any kind of oppressive
wouldn’t be powder-kegged
wouldn’t be skyfallen
wouldn’t be
we can’t be
moonsoft
interior dark
ready
(it was her
that
undid the
standing
in the
nothing
at all
mapping out
her freckles.)
dark skyfall of her hair
welling up
who hurtled
stop—
it had no other meaning
I wasn’t running
I wasn’t running from her
from Brooklyn
concrete
no big deal.
we were creating
(yes, both of us)
snowy charade because I
and she
and I
her winter
our winter.
Rivendell Writer's Colony writer-in-residence fellowship, 2017-2018 — Sewanee, TN
Poetry on Demand 2017 poet with The Porch & Versify — Nashville, TN
“Picnic Table” published in limited-edition letterpress collection, Center for Book Arts Emerging Writers Workshop, 2013 — New York, NY
Backyards & Boulevards Anthology:
"First House"
Podium Literary Journal:
Quail Bell Magazine:
“They Yanked Out Percy Shelley’s Heart”
"Better Get Back (to Chelsea)"
The Arts Politic Magazine:
“Epistle to Boss”
“To the Man on 27th Street"
“The Assistant Professors from Southern Massachusetts”
Helicon Magazine:
“La Mignardise"
“The Relatives”
Connecticut Young Writers' Magazine:
“Before the Ballet (after Degas)”
GHAZAL FOR CAROLINA
Love landed on me again
I'm my own abductee again
shaped like a girl with a plan:
to lose useless memory again
side by side our feeble shields
start to knock knee to knee again
eyeing the oil on the road
sun at a certain degree again
blankets & blank bashfulness
siphoning vitamin D again
too pyretic to touch
ameliorated & free again
uninvited but beckoned
breathing lungs empty again
warp & weft we'd woven & worn
all fall, a carpenter bee again
seeking the seaside to hide
shrieks a shy banshee again
tiptoeing painfully slow
west to Tennessee again
bronzing beside me:
she again, no guarantee again
out to sea again
They Yanked Out Percy Shelley's Heart
When the poet perished,
Like Cowper’s each, alone
in a boating accident,
his body was brought
cobalt and cold and odd-mottled
to the beach, where they burned it for fear
of silent and barnacle-bred disease.
While dead Shelley’s chest gave birth to a sunset
he opened like an oyster, tugged
with flames like hooks like stares. There
was his heart—a strange juicy jewel
being freed from its cage, a reticent bird,
a herring whose net has relinquished
this small nautical gleam like a wound.
Then someone rushed in,
weirdly eager to pluck
the precious vegetable from its bone-church.
They shied from the bonfire,
wet gleam in hand,
to put that bloody, naked mouse
in the hand of Shelley’s wife.
She must have kept it, mustn’t she?
A scummy soap-dish occupant, or
the jellied contents of a screw-top jar,
reflecting the lid’s checkers in red and white.
I’m sure that high-necked, apocalyptic Mary
Shelley wasn’t squeamish—she,
Frankenstein’s young mother,
could have kept much worse
than a jelly-jar heart.
Quite the prize, this percussive beast
deprived of drum and burn and home.
Mary must have rested assured that she possessed the best
essence of Percy’s Romantic temperament, now cold
and rubbery, congealed like day-old food.
Perhaps her dramatic example, its blood-filled physicality,
is one to be followed. Should we give up
our ashes? Toss toes and breasts of beloveds,
lend their eyelashes to the wind?
Instead
we could keep their hearts,
stacked like shells
on the mantelpiece, like books or boxes or framed photos.
These jelly-jar hearts, winking gluttons and glowing,
for us to take down on holidays and dust
off like good china, like sugared peaches,
to hold their jeweled fire to the light
and admire.