Anticipation
The man in the moon
is sitting in his bathtub.
His washcloth in his hand,
he is scrubbing his left heel.
Because tomorrow,
he has a date with
that skinny barista
from Ashtabula.
Who is sitting on her front porch,
rocking slowly away from Ohio.
Looking at him and wondering if
she should make a wish.
Published on The Laundry Line, 11 mar 2025.
Lost Girl Sonnet
Muscles jostle against waterlilies.
A scab can cover a wound for a punctuated year.
I am like this sometimes—
A cat licking chicken juice out of the bottom of the sink.
The thing about the past is that the phone always picks up.
Random facts never come to mind when you need a random fact.
Of all the ways that we call the sea, why do we never call her lover?
I wish I didn’t have these ears; they only make me lonelier.
But my earrings sure are pretty.
I am unsure where the sky ends and heaven begins.
This way the spell will remain unbroken.
My eyes are witness to the falling down of the one yellow sock—calcetine.
Discretion is gone, along with the rest of my Spanish vocabulary.
And now all my shoes have untied their neighbor’s laces.
Originally published in Loose Change, Ghost City Press, 2023.
Publishing on The Laundry Line, 4 March 2025.
Architecture
We put our pasts
in our pockets where they
rub up against loose change and ghost stories.
They mingle with the confetti of every
laundry list,
want ad,
parking ticket, and
fable
that we have used to explain and confound our lives.
Truth rubs off and leaves formless
tokens that we stamp with misremembered particulars
and implausible circumstances.
Counterfeit materials to construct skeletons
on which we hang new biographies.
Fragile bones
lying our secrets into existence.
Originally published in Loose Change, Ghost City Press, 2023
Published on The Laundry Line, 25 Feb 2025
Silhouettes
The sun had just reached over the hill and
the crows were muttering their approval.
As the departing stars scavenged up the
the birds’ black shadows,
a branch cracked under
the weight of so many thieves.
Like a sneeze they flew. A sneeze
that broke my one remaining rib. That crack,
the death of all
shadows,
then the eyes of the sun popped out.
ode to the letter b
not the beginning
of the alpha-
bet
but somewhere at its head.
perhaps level with the eyebrows
wild whipping
bushy blatantly untamed
eye
brows
Einstein had nothing on the bravery of her eye brows
she blows
batters the shutters
we have failed to batten
down on Sunday morning
and we return to blue
berries
piebald sheep and that
white horse with one blue eye
she is not my sister Beth
who
is also beautiful
she
is bathed in blue starlight
believe in her gravity
her heft
no light balloon
she sinks to the bottom of the bath
waiting for the water to cool
and the bubbles to subside
back into oily scum on the surface
she doesn’t belong to me
or you
or the alphabet, really
she’s just there
2nd in line to the throne
while ‘A’ shines
her little tiara always
straight on her perfectly
shellacked bouffant
ah see ‘b’ has
crept in even here
is there no where she cannot go
pregnant belly in front of her
she is waiting to become
Published on The Laundry Line, Tue 11 Feb, 2025
