poems

 

End of Summer Days

You said to write  when the seasons change, to let the forward motion  unsettle my words.    Let the phrases which sunbathed  across the tree outside  my bedroom window  crinkle between their thinning leaves,  be swallowed by fragility.    Study the birds  that nested between its branches, write how they rush  to distant summers, their […]

Read more...

A Communal Space

On shallow evenings, your lover takes to chafing dried oil off  old roasting trays,  scraping dirt lodged  like clay between floor tiles with her pinky nail. On all fours, her joints click in the  rigor of her cleansing.    Your lover takes  to retying sneaker laces  for a proper loop,  over and under and knotted,  […]

Read more...

A Walk After Dinner

An hour of silhouettes: leaves like sponged paint pressed against clean linen— branches brushed with ebony  in a heavy hand, and dusted with amber streetlight— trunks like wet pastels swept sideways,  soaking into sleeping sand.  This hour is its own shadow,  itself and its outline.  A tree’s roots lengthen  behind the drying oils of these […]

Read more...

Dry Mornings

When the candle wax over this morning cools,  I hope it fastens all as it is, now.    I hope it stiffens over still countertops and stool legs, over dinner dishes  stacked like a house of cards— the towel underneath already dry  from soapy droplets. It caught and drank  while we slept in separate beds, […]

Read more...

A Poem for Natan Alterman

Sidewalks crinkle from rainstorms in Jersey,  ridge between suburban valleys and cave under flood-lines,  like my Savta’s fingers pruned from three generations  of kneading dough  and scrubbing baby scalps  under the drip drip  of a shower head that never fully ceased its flow.    This path darkens  under trunk-form shadows  like my Saba’s shoulders  after […]

Read more...

The House on Blue Hill Street

Like clouds,  I build people from window sills— fill in sketchpads of their panes with Monday nights. Prints of tennis tournaments  suspend from fridge magnets,  notes for filo dough fray thumbtacked to a cork overhang— the recipe, a family heirloom; the cork, left behind by the home’s  previous owners.    Faces eclipse across channels of […]

Read more...

A Basketball Left Outside for the Winter

Your form looks seasoned from the endline. Your streaks faded where winter has fouled you,  squeezed and stretched your leather, tugged at your jersey while the rest of us  spent halftime behind a closed garage.    Benched, you inhaled and held for a season,  retired by the base of the hoop.   You wheeze a […]

Read more...

Graham v. Connor (1989)

Guns become soundless  when their ringing is omnipresent, when their bullets  are metronomic,  when their tragedy tastes prosthetic,  grieved in phrases  between sips of morning coffee,  lukewarm on our tongue.    Their sounds  were shrill with virus  long before our illness  forced us to listen.    We think we know  quarantine  when bodies  have been  […]

Read more...

Quarantine in Overview

I have reached the back cover  of my journal, blackened three  yellow legal pads, I’ve soiled  dinner plates with my dreams,  self-published my poem in the  blank pages of The Bluest Eye.    I have taken to my basement  walls to chart my meditations,  the branches of my imagining.

Read more...

Saddle Brook County Park

What would be my heaven?  Trimmed grass, fresh with streaks.  Trash cans just emptied,  their bodies stretching shadows on asphalt.    A swing in residue motion,  slowing to stillness,  its rubber seat still warm  with a child’s joy.    Distant voices and  closer birds, hushed and hastened gossip,  circles coexisting.    A forgotten soccer ball,  […]

Read more...