magpie's shiny things

Supplication

Supplication

We need a patron saint for the banana boxes 
	that they pack your groceries in down at Costco,
… 	for boys in backwards ball caps,
… 	for velcro shoes and old men with wraparound sunglasses.
We need a patron saint for poets 
	the ones without faith and the ones with scars from teenage acne, 
… 	for body oil, pipe bombs, and transdermal nicotine,
… 	for every Mexican cab driver who has ever gotten me safely 
	to my destination in spite of my inability 
	to correctly pronounce colonia,
… 	for the brown and white saddle shoes my mother wore in high school.
We need a patron saint for the tumbling worded prayers of children 
	who mistake God for Good,
… 	for the space between Holy and Whole Foods,
… 	for anaphor, onomatopoeia, and the cultural references 
	to the 1970’s in the New York Times crossword puzzle. 
We need a patron saint for days when the sun shines 
	slantwise and the dogs lie down 
	in the dust behind the barns.
We need a patron saint for small stakes gambling, 
… 	for unacknowledged acts of contrition,
… 	for the places that angels cannot go because 
	their wings do not fit.

Originally published on The Laundry Line, March 25, 2025

Pittsburgh


Pittsburgh 

A creased wedding photograph of a woman.
A Mass Card when she passes.
The facts of her life
support no further conclusions.
About the necessity of ambulances.
The man who held 
her in his childish embrace.
She is the silence that avalanches down to
a mute son with too many mothers.
Not enough uncles to help put the pigs back
into the sties. 
On Friday night after the football game. 
Teenage boys lick the lipgloss 
off of the head cheerleader.
She is the fact of a ride up to the cemetery.
Her grandfather tumbles down with the cicadas.
She is the silent face of  
a younger brother who collapses.
The folding chairs and carries them to the 
attic full of trunks and shoe boxes. 
The shoes from her other life.
She is the silence, a crimson wedge.
Cheese rind made of ash 
from the steel furnaces that
soot the city.
We can say no more.

Published on The Laundry Line, 18 March 2025

Anticipation

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

Photo by Jaizer Capangpangan on Unsplash

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

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