POEMS
"A Tuesday in My Twenties," ONE ART – August 2024
I asked the robin nesting
in the bottlebrush tree
if love would find me more easily
if I wore the red scarf.
In that era of wanting,
I’d pluck the morning’s loneliness
like stones from my pockets
to set along the windowsill.
My mother used to arrange shards
of pottery like that to catch the light.
Make your own luck, she would say,
yet the clouds kept shifting.
On a different day, without the scarf,
I tumbled into love at the Elbo Room,
his dark leather jacket cool beneath
my palms on the dance floor.
That was the beginning
of everything—the luck
we made and all the rest
we could do nothing about.
"Motel Pool Outside Cheyenne," Rust+Moth – Spring 2020 (Pushcart Prize nominee)
I held my new husband like a tray
on the tips of my fingers,
the sky above us a wide bowl
heavy with late summer dusk.
His long body tense,
he gripped the back of my neck,
a child’s concentration in his brow.
I rocked gently on my toes,
whispering Just relax,
craning my neck away
to show him he could let go.
That he’d never learned to swim
was just one thing that surfaced
on the honeymoon drive
from Missouri to California,
the Tom Waits cassette on repeat,
our scant belongings packed
into the trunk of someone else’s car.
What I remember is how
he kept staring up at the sky,
as I’d told him to do, paddling his hands
and feet, trying to hit a rhythm
that would keep him afloat,
and how as I backed away
I felt myself lose my footing,
nearing the deep end that seemed
to come out of nowhere.