Samples of my Poetry
Granny’s Guide to the Galaxy
On nights when Florida pours herself
like molten sky into the darkness,
when breathing feels like drowning
and no one wants to swim though the night
to sit by your side, it might not be
the best idea to drop a hit of acid,
then ask your grandmother
how to clean puke from the wooden floor,
or tell her at length how you and the family cat
have “exchanged consciousness”
and now are both one and the same.
You might not want to tell her you’re “tripping balls,”
that the intensity of color, the liquid brown
of the cat’s eyes, the feel of the fur
beneath your hands made you want to weep,
though she did clean up the vomit,
make you a cup of chamomile tea,
wrap you in a soft blanket against the chills,
and sing you to sleep, dreaming
of a time when just the thrill
of unfolding your limbs
into a run, or climbing to the top of a tree
was as high as you needed to be.
Published: August, 2017
North Of Oxford
https://northofoxford.wordpress.com/
Cold Front in Miami
No snow like back in ‘77
but it rained iguanas,
dropping like icicles from trees,
their catatonic bodies too cold to grip,
falling from mango, ficus, cabbage palm,
the hibiscus turned inward and brown,
bromeliads dried up on the spot, wind
sucked them dry, even the fish turned belly up
and vultures circled the bridges, perching
with the pelicans, who warily moved over.
The longest cold front in memory,
a world gone crazy with Floridians
bundled in scarves, coats, mittens,
extra blankets piled on the bed, reading
of earthquakes, landslides, blizzards.
Everyone still waiting for a sign.
Published: The Liberal Media Made Me Do It, 2013
Redshift*
(For Joshua)
Science states parallel lines do not intersect,
yet over the years, we have crossed paths
like swords in arms—combative, yes, but just
as often comradely, collusion and collision so similar,
as you spin off in your own orbit toward the future,
unknowable, mysterious, revealed only to psychics
attuned to the signs, while I, ignorant
and soon to be alone, can only wait for the “truth foretold,”
can only hope you have the tools to build
whatever you need for whatever storm will come.
*“A redshift occurs whenever a light source moves away from an observer”
Published in Sanctuary
Journal of the NCHC
Science and Sex
What of the world of Quantum Physics,
atoms and quarks, electrons,
particles, waves, and beams of light.
A flash is blue, bright cerulean blue
in a tundra of white, crystal hard.
Not many have seen it
and those that have, have names
like Newton or Galileo, even Edison,
perhaps now Gates, moving
from electron to silicone.
Perhaps this explains
how, untouched, I still yearn
for the excited rubbing of atoms—
yours against mine,
any you, any how,
as long as there are eyes
to look into, perhaps to swim,
perhaps to drown.
Published: Georgetown Review, 2005
More Poems
Header Subtitle
Ghazal for My Daughter
Each time we speak, my daughter
and I, atoms explode in my daughter.
There seems to be nothing I can do
nothing to say, nothing to save my daughter.
If I gave her the trees, she’d want the sky,
so great is the hunger of my daughter.
Words are waves eroding rock
over time, everything breaks my daughter.
Somehow, it’s always my fault, still
my fault for not living only for my daughter.
The sun shines steady every day
but the moon waxes and wanes in my daughter.
Too strong, she says, too harsh, this sun, this
mother which warms then burns my daughter.
Published, 2019: Universal Oneness: An Anthology of Magnum Opus Poems from around the World
The Cape Was Never White
First of all, I was not skipping.
I never skip, but yes, I was eating
strawberries: red, ripe, delicious.
I had heard rumors
that girls who ate them
would never want for men.
I was after the woodcutter
not the wolf, but the wolf
was quicker, sly, and intense.
I hadn’t meant to enjoy it—
but being swallowed whole
was a definite kick
no man could ever give.
Published in Fourteen Hills, 2008
Faith
Faith
And what did Isaac think
when his father took him
by the hand, led him from
his mother’s keeping, up
the strange mountain
to the smooth stone table?:
What went through his head
as Abraham lifted him up
laid him out, tilted
his neck back just so?
As they trudged back home,
Isaac scrambling to keep up,
do you think it possible
that in his father’s presence
he could ever turn his back again?
Published in The Apalachee Review, 2002