I have not written a single poem about Malawi.It’s been more than a yearsince I journeyed thereon a missionto help girls stay in school. It makes no sense. The whole country is a sonnetof wandering […]
Category: Poetry
WFMJ: Phoenix
Dear old world, ~after L.M. Montgomery dear brave, fluttering, flowing old world, dear hungering world, cracked and blistered world, dear world embarrassed at yourself, at what you are capable of, bursting open in spring with […]
WFMJ: San Diego
Call Kindness an Anti-currency Call kindness sweat or carbon dioxide expelled. The essence of exchange between organisms. A natural resource that can’t be stockpiled or charged interest. Call it a setting free, not a paying. […]
Reincarnation
“Her wounds came from the same source as her power” -Adrienne Rich 1.I dreamt my father dated a man. He pulleda 3 x 5 from his wallet. Blonde strandsspilled off the man’s shoulders in black […]
Punk Boy
I still see him in cigarette-burned photographs,his hair a messy tuft of Medusa locks,streaked red, black, and green,his coke-rimmed glasses duct-tapedafter an elbow to the face at a punk show.I still see him glossy-eyed,lingering outside […]
Strange Fruit
for Abel Meeropol and Billie Holiday No one will hang you with a noose tonight,Either of sisal, hemp, or the chord of Southern steel. But falling on the narrowing alleys of your freedom,The Freudian slip […]
Refugee
I was a stranger and you welcomed me. To those with ears: a crisis looms— the sojourner is at the door of our strange land. Desperate, hopeful, hungry, tired, the least of these lie down […]
Hope is a Thing with Muscle
My teacher said I should not rewrite Dickinson,that we need fly-up, soar-to-skyrising-above-us guides. Wings. She’s wrong. Hope requires muscle,grit, I-will-do, flex of sinewhere. Present. Woke. Able. Stargazing and skywritingwill not move the plow. Push. Lift […]
Unholy Triptych for the New Immigrant
Madres— women forced to spreadtheir legs, open their mouthsto coyotes in desertsinside shipping containershooked to Mack Trucks,husbands and childrentorn from them—your tired your poor Padres—men in safe housesalong the long routebraving bordersstarved and beatenbadgered and […]
tracks from there to here
Midnight, the train, the heard past, the rumbling stall of an apartment behind the jukebox, the cattle call of miners, pipefitters, boilermakers naming shots chased with budweisers. The dirty hands, dirty faces. The women beehived […]
