magpie's shiny things

Ode to the Rings of Saturn

Photo by NASA Hubble Space Telescope on Unsplash

Ode to the Rings of Saturn

What could be
more perfect
than a planet
cradled in the 
arms of its own rings?

A giant bedded
down in the icy
remains of its
once beautiful spouse.

Songless world
belted with the
white track of 
a 30-year storm.

Huge head halo'd
by twirling dust motes
and the bodies
of his children:

O Rhea, O Mimas,
O Titan,
pockmarked beauty—
outpost of man's 
ambitions.

Their shadows stride across 
the face of this world.

Above his shoulder,
an icy crescent,
Tethys rises.

“O” she says, “O”
	and again
	more slowly “O”

“With rings like those
I would never
be alone in the dark.”

Published on The Laundry Line, May 20, 2025.

spark notes — how not to read a poem

spark notes - how not to read a poem

All narrative poems are conflations
of the things that happened to the poet
and stories told by her mother
when the January nights got to be too much.

Do not be misled by the line,
the poet was drunk when she laid it down.

Dogs find the 
classically rigorous poetry 
of the early 19th  century stifling.

Cats, however, relish the constraints
of the Japanese forms.
A haibun will often soothe their
fears of thunder and wild parsley.

Read poetry on an empty stomach, 
to feed your hungry misapprehensions. 

If a poem moves you on a Tuesday, 
revisit it on a Friday 
as the moon rises behind the Nabisco factory;
read it again on Sunday
when you should be in church.
You will not be able to substitute one reading for the other.

Published on The Laundry Line, 14 May, 2025.

I Was Once Persphone

I Was Once Persephone

last week I tore a page out of your book.
tomorrow I will tape my own verse
to its ragged remnants.
the remnants of 
your page I mean. 

it will be about 
a moon that spins slowly
and echoes our fugitive secrets.

that one poem I cannot make work.
	oh Luna,
	oh Hyperion,
	oh Pluto
		— demoted.

Published on the Laundry Line May 6th, 2025

Tina & Rico and Bernard & Theresa

Tina & Rico and Bernard & Theresa

Mama made the switch 
jump the track
choo-choo
she said 
as she stuffed applesauce 
up the baby’s nose.

Tina wanted Rico
wanted Rico so hard
she nearly split
that watermelon boozed hard
Rico split
and Tina went away to Bernard.

Bernard brave as a bear
falters his father face
on the staircase to Theresa’s room.

Bernard will only say
that Theresa is already gone.
Theresa, that strange huntress,
ready to sign her way through
a father’s vigilance;
her soft virgin’s virtues sing
an eight-bar blues
about the fall of night on the Neva river.
Her river runs through it unnamed. 
This is the smallest word. 

Word comes to Tina,
Mama and the baby are on the train
home.
choo-choo

Published on The Laundry Line April 19th, 2025.

Waiting for the Rains


Waiting for the Rains

20 miles to the north the Bolt Creek fire burns 
up a draw towards the ridge climbing 
along lines laid deep in the soil
it burns first one way
then another
the weird sentience of wild fire
its imperative to consume and grow
now blocked and burning back on itself
burning the trees to charcoal and 
then burning the charcoal again
hotter and hotter
we too are burning 
and re-burning the same ground
waiting to be quenched.

Published on The Laundry Line 22 April 2025.