Poetry Archive

Into the new year with old wounds.
Doctor appointments lined up.
I want to let go of grief, its weep,
rend, and wrack. Realizing the news
will never, ever go away. Small souls
will always go adrift. Blankets are
constantly pulled over weary heads.

Escape to a late-night stroll on the Boardwalk
to find what honky-tonk money will buy.
Snake-oil salesmen wait even under a full moon.
More steps down the pier. Now, past midnight,
edge of the world, my grudges begin to disappear.

Let me move slow as crippled stars, find
a philosophy here in the unanchored expanse.
I try to rework the words of scripture, forget
years hunkered down, swinging old swords.
Bury them all in flecks of moonlight.

published in Birdland Journal · January 2020

A night wind interrogates
pines on Pescadero’s tangled
coast. The roiled sea
unbuckles, flattens.

Other sounds—plaintive voices
press hard against my house.
Someone
unbidden in my life.

Through the curtain-chink, I listen,
review dark thoughts of those
I might have hurt, actions left
undone.

I vow to examine my voice
of privilege, pledge whatever
of life remains. Words
unspoken.                       

published BeZine · June 2020

The plane slides over the Bay Bridge,
and I return to my small life.
Hydrangeas dip their heads when
my suitcase thuds against the door.

I stand in silence, spend moments
in hope of a muted rest,
as sounds of the airport fade.
I hardly move, want to feel a little less

human to connect with the red-tailed hawk 
on the oak branch above me,
the way he holds his head,
resting after his own whirlwind of flight. 

Evening penetrates me and our earth,
each plant and animal that survives,
touching now—hawk, hydrangeas,
on the back door, my gnarled hand.

 published: Birdland Journal · January 2020

Nut brown sparrow, my operatic companion.
 No sound from my poem, just her
 three quick notes and a jumble of trills.

Warm April in the Peninsula suburb,
 language in my hand. Stir of time,
 branching a new way to write. I hear

her insistence. Silence is suspended
 again. I walk closer in the cut grass
 and ask her pardon for my intrusion.

Fledglings emerge from the birdhouse,
 perch on the edge of the rim, falter, fall
 away from the rail to damp earth.

She sings to them from her perch.
 Her sound rides spring exhalations
 from new leafed oaks and lilacs.

I hope for the third try and their wings lift,
 song-filled and with new memory
 of flight under wind-streaked feathers.

Published in Birdland Journal  · January 2020

a Japanese White Eye in her nest sings
 her world together in strands

the metallurgy of morning
 copper sky, ocher sea from last night’s storm
 tinny sounds of traffic on the lower road

then quiet
 the mind arranges like a Mozart chord
 nothing budges, a hush of grace says:

write it down

Published in Voce Piena · December 2004

After she’s out, maybe she’ll paint
her walls purple, bright as her son’s
name tattooed on her arm. Salvador.

 She’ll bake pies and love the cinnamon heat
in her kitchen. Walk to Key Market
on 5th Street for menudo and tease the butcher.

She’ll work someplace, maybe buy a teacup
and sit on a stoop some night with a man.
Not Salvador. Someone who likes heat.

Make coffee with real cream. 
Wear shoes with straw wedges. Dance
to Aretha (who can tease with the best of them).

None of her poems rhymed but she filled pages
with longing when I read Emily Dickenson to her —
another life mostly spent alone in a room.

published in By & By Poetry · October 2015

This morning, I want to search
for lost children wrenched
from families at the border,

and sent in random directions
on random airplanes across states
to fit into random new lives.

Do these children step out of fear
in dreams and fly back to beds
next to siblings in Guadalajara

or escape cots covered with metallic
blankets, enclosed in cold storage
rooms on the US side of the Rio?

I hope tears are someday forgotten
and there is a faint blue in the hollow
of eyes in deep sleep. Their mothers,

will rescue and wrap them in longed-
for arms. In the news, I want to read
something incredible: Today, the lost

children escaped and drifted in peace
on pastel clouds pulling them
upwards along streams of soft air,

soaring in the wake of colored birds
leading to safety. The wind whispers
“You have been found”.

We must protect and release them,
repair rifts in this world so children
are kissed goodnight by parents

and moment to moment will trust
waiting strangers will not send them
flying away in nightmares of loss.

published in BeZine  · June 2021

If you could only see the few of you left here.
If you could only hear me mourn the shortness
of your days and getting shorter as I speak.

I’m grateful for your solace and shade
even as you succumb to hotter summers—
sparse raindrops on fluted bark, spare roost
for red hawks and swarming crows.

I decipher your voice among other voices.
You speak to me at pasture’s edge because
you know my days are also numbered.

My spirit, the rare sight of it, comes here
for courage—the way we each fight as our parts
fall away with Butternut canker or breast cancer,

and because you speak to it each green vowel
of your life’s language. 

You are in the hidden ditches of the OR,
doctors bent over your skull,
working on your right eyeball. The one left.
I’m amid plastic plants in the waiting room.
Pieces of my voice are thrown away as I find
myself talking to them in solitude.
My mind calms with a walk on a farm road:
brow of hayfields, blue eye of bass pond,
drift of Unadilla headwaters moving
like blood cells through veins.
When you awake, when you hear
my fear-whipped voice, I will be tempted 
to say:  I love you.  But I won’t say that.
You know our slogan:   Keep it light.

Perhaps in time, I won’t think
about my breasts. Soft robins
of flesh once above my waist.

Each spring, they would spread
flat on the machine. Wings
stretched against a metal cloud.

I sucked a breath, a whir,
syllabled a prayer, a doctor smiled—
No cancer. Not this year.

Cut from their fleshy nest, they left
nothing but bare branches, radial
lines scraped clean. Now, I move

from one moment into the next,
and into the one after. Breathing.
Their memory a day-flying thing.

Now, I am safer outdoors, testing
the wild. The open, round hills.
The chance of living around me.

published in Cider Press Review · 2020

July’s heat melts my spine—
strong, worn, chiseled with age,
curved into a meshed lawn chair
on my tiny patio. A wall clock taps.
I square my thumbs and fingers
together, frame a Sweet 100
on its caged vine—climb through
picture window. I take the scent
into my skull as a farm girl would.
My hands are cold from extracting
Mr. Shake’s Maple Walnut
stashed in the freezer like weed.
I am spooned into bliss in a walled
memory in this tomato’s hot breath.
In seconds, the magnetic pull of
decorum is gone, and that girl before
me, is matted with dirt, digging
until dusk in sun-rippled shadows.

Everything about me, old and urban,
is turning both make-believe and real.
In what is left on this smooth surface
of today’s boredom, a drawn-out
thought. Don’t mock it as senseless
nostalgia. At what point is a former you
gone completely? Just for now, keep her
before me. Then try, try to get
closer—
not to wish it all back but stay drawn
to the source, keep those seconds
of passion like a body gives shape to a soul.

Maples close to my back porch
still wear summer’s green uniform.
Soft rain stopped minutes ago
flushing the woods and mown grass.
I must ready myself for sleep
but sit serene in the rocker and absorb
what I cannot say—
is anything as cruel or sweet
as the shortening of our days?

What does this life mean but itself?
In short hours left, let me keep
doubts shut. Pry windows open.
Sun gone. Geese fly low to the pond.
Do they care where they’re headed?
I throw down the toothbrush, peel off
my pajamas, walk out the door.
Grass blades will never be so whetted,
Earth so forgiving.

I want to scream, accusatory as a seagull,
when something has been wrested away.
I want to choke and weep, but instead invite
friends to dinner as if everything is in its place.

I wait for red swirls to stop in round goblets 
as we toast these masks we wear at day’s end.
I wait to stop seeing mounds—green hills of March,
cloud rolls over local hills, a Sikh’s head wrap.

I wait for the scar to fade—arm to arm, red
stitches march like daffodils along my fence line.  
I wait for his night reach for my chest when  
deaf-mute gods will unveil at last, all things to us.

A tired espresso machine grinds
at the back counter. Niveous foam
runs down the edge of my thick-rimmed cup.

Over there, a chair scrapes against a wall,
a business suit leaves in a rustle
of New York Times. Laptops ignore each other.

My body—soft, alive, determined
to disappear. Raisin-y smells and caffeine
drawing me forward like a morning compass.

published in Mangrove · 2015

plastic breasts from a catalogue
stuff my lace bra 

borrowed contours
in a recognizable landscape

I want to shout a little in praise 
without a major commotion

I join all the creatures
and flowers who adapt

like the winter pruned rose bush
in pink bloom this morning

July’s gasp for water,
farmers pray, cows eat brown grass, 
sweet peas turn blue as they die.

Terrified:
we will become faint fossils.
The world still remains almost beautiful.

Last night’s 
ferocious dry thunder
still air, wonder at the torrent.

This morning, roses bloom on a back fence,
mount their cedar posts,
Cumulus clouds so thick, I can lean against the sky.

Hay bales ripped by the downpour,
exposed like large gray animals.
I smell the earth-breath again.

How rain turns the world
from one moment to the next
in startlement.

Years ago, I met Monarchs
on mornings when I led cows
in from dew-damp pastures.

Dawn sky like old varnish,
they searched farms stitched  
with milkweed’s frothy sap.

Thousands flew out of the blueness
to lay eggs, suck juice for a journey,
briefly pause in our wetlands.

Now, I stand in a dry field of wild parsnip,
burdocks, to search for them. One alights
on my shoulder as if I was the last
shaking stalk of milkweed. Blotched
and unfurrowed fields, maple woods
we thought we knew, do not guide them.

We wander with wintriness still beneath
June clouds, no further sorrow possible—
since we too will not be spared.

shortlisted in UK Environmental Poetry Prize · 2022

he dresses for breakfast and our walk
spills egg on his clean shirt
more buttons again forward through
the black now with white cane
tapping tapping tapping
outside he holds tight on my arm
two steps behind me we listen
for the familiar romance
in the voices of birds
stop, surrender our breath in imitation
edges of our bodies vanish
and no further sorrow possible
in any form

Small things make the past
Eavan Boland: The Old City

Someone is out there near the sap house
walking back from the Sugar Bush.

Sunlight wraps its reaching and rounding over the East Meadow.
April’s air beckons life to new leaf.

(these were woods and meadows before they had names)

Your great grandmother enters by the mud room,
hangs her ruffled apron on the kitchen shelf,
tin bucket full of fresh sap.

Entangle your arms with hers,
haul the cast iron pot together to the fire,
watch the liquid boil, thick and dark.

(make this her story, not yours)

Now, say I did what I could.
Taste hot syrup on johnny cakes.

Pull back your chair, recall

my tongue’s taste of maple,

my greening woods.

 published in Mantis · 2020