poetry

Untitled [In the car,]

In the car,

we spliced the equator. Made it

down somewhere warm,

down somewhere Caribbean,

maybe. Click. Click.

My teeth spoke Morse.

The scene is dangerous: I lie

flat as a postcard,

loose as sand

while the highway threw knives

at our necks. Throw me, then.

Getting to know someone, I drum. I wait

for them to ask me what it was like,

in the car.

Regnum Ormond

The beach is empty because it is January.

It is “freezing” at fifty degrees because

it has been declared to be. I appreciate

the privacy to witness the sand pale and unclaimed

No witnesses no bright plastic no music

Just the wind and the water, doing

what they do, without commentary.

That droning on inspires a droning on

within me, operating the same slow machinery

of loss. Often do I feel overwhelmed

within the solidarity of the surf

Indifferent; patient. Alone,

on the coldest day of the year, I

admire my kingdom.

III

You used to be scared of the dark

as a kid. It was around the time

when I had bigger things to worry about.

I spit blood in the same bushes we

laughed in front of as a hurricane rolled in,

all sideways rain and wind. Contrary to popular belief,

I never minded wiping your face and

tying your tie. These days, I cannot picture

your crying, snotty face as clearly as I used to.

You’re standing taller than me, now, and all you

do lately is call and ask if I will come home. I heard you’ve

been sleeping in my bed, and I instruct mom

to give you a night-light,

I don’t have one, he’s going to be scared in there all by himself. At least leave the door open.

You haven’t been afraid of the dark since

you were 13, when I left and you had to

tie your own tie and started wearing the

sweaters I left behind. Sometimes,

when we’re standing at the airport or the

train station or in front of my

packed car or at the hospital, and I grab

your broad shoulders and give you a hug,

I hate the clumsiness in which it happens. We’re two

fumbling men embracing with the awkwardness

of any other brothers.

[Per usual,]

Per usual, we did not

move, lest the night

unspool its magic

ribbon at our feet;

banish us to bed.

God forbid we do

anything else but

sit, and sit, and sit.

In the early morning,

when the world is

still very wet, I did

not mind it.

In those days, I was

never tired

Starman goes rogue
Ziggy’s zed, you heard,
zipped right through the
zero-hour, wafted around the
zebra-thick static of the spider head.

Ziggy hummed backwards. Managed to
zone out the band, tried to forget what the war was for as
zircon constellations pooled in the sky, as those
zeppelins– real ones– bloomed in his gin, went straight to

zoom under his skin, zap until the meat twitched just right. but he

just poses, just wants to look at the sky,
zodiac-drunk, zen, zoot in the suit pocket,
strung-out with defeat, he’d admit
Ziggy’s gone nova, zoosh, zap, kapow,

try being human now

Popcorn Cart Cage
The bed keeps its shape through the afternoon,

light stays where it lands and the room repeats–
is it possible to move like dust, move
without asking? without needing to leave?
I wonder. Back then, before anything else,

somewhere down the hall there was a lectern.
All the cats spent six years alone, sleeping

through it, then awake, then sleeping again.
My glass sweats slowly on the table while

I waste the air. The window doesn’t mind.
Nothing arrives to change the scale of things,
everything is “almost there,” the cats are

somewhere. A song keeps playing, neither

for nor against me. Ambivalence, then.

I can see through my eyelids when I go to sleep at night

When dark arrives it lands
in a room already halfway gone.

There ought not to be doors, nor hands–

if anything, that hush that lasts too long

I count my fingers through skin
via glow: dim, white, and obscene
Thank God for any shape that shines thin
as bone through the halogen machine.

_______
the fan hums its meek ballet
I reckon sleep is just playing dead,
I say I like the play

These nights I test the dark for silhouettes

which name me once, and then forget

Thumb fiddling/pretending to be busy
Back from the pub. Past midnight ,

we’re in your bedroom as MTV flickers on mute
Washes your walls in dull neon.
You sway at your desk, past drunk,

tinkering with a melody.

You ask me to sing, and I do.

The smoke from your stupid cigar is soaked

into the curtains, into your shirt, into the pillow

I’m sinking as you loop the same six measures again

ask me if they’re “like a stanza.” The smell makes

my eyes sting, but I stay still because there’s

nowhere else to be, watching your silhouette wobble

in that greasy light.

Brittany Spears is dancing on the television.

In a Williams Sonoma everything seems possible

Lunar New Year Napkins, Grenadine pots,

two thousand dollars for some knives (who needs twelve of them?), the espresso machine

plots a future I could sip. There is a breed of standing juicer that waits

to serve me, to juice some impossible citrus. There are shelves of glassware that could collapse from thought alone,

the olive oil dispenser traps amber in a sunbeam. Really,

I could build a life with this ice cube embosser. This is the shit

that matters. This is the domain of registries, where people come

when it’s time to try again.

I think: if I bought this toaster, would it be easier

to wake up? I pretend to pour something from the checkerboard kettle, imagine

what sort of tea I drink in this little fantasy of mine. To get the employee off my back,

I say I’m moving sometime soon. He aborts his credit card pitch, tells me to start small. This is

bonafide American craftsmanship. Get a pan, or a cocktail set. Not too much, or it’ll weigh you down.

But I should have something, he says, to carry.

proser’s trampling

The field exhaled a breath tonight,

settling into comfortable slumber

just to stir catching stars in

the fleeting frost. Is this dying

breath or just the scattering of

embers– From what heaven,

what winged messengers, I

wouldn’t know. Meanwhile

you will be busy on your hands and knees

to discern if the glittering in the moonlight is dew, or funnel-weaver webs, or frost.

When no one is looking, I will press my hands to the soil and the air will be so still, thrumming in my palms, that I will forget how to breathe. Ask the sparrows and the leaves and the fields how I looked, if they can say so much. In confidence, I squint at the misty horizon when the sun is melting into the ground and try to roll around some words in my head about the natural state of it all. The most I can do is think about how the winter-whipped branches remind me of someone I once knew. Not everything needs this stain of a human observer but I can’t do much about trekking, circling footprints all in the snow.

You ask me if I still Pray, sometimes

Now, there is something about deliverance.

I will spend half of my life praying to be rescued,

half of my life on my knees

asking for things I don’t have the words for.

You know the feeling, though:

the one that can only really come to you when you shove yourself

somewhere you’ve long outgrown

(in a linen closet,

in a confessional,

under your bed)

with the comfort of a hot lump in your throat and

only here, in these places, can you be truly holy

Remember when you were a child?

Hiding in those secret, sacred places, the excitement of it all

You will grow, it isn’t so thrilling anymore,

see necessity, see the purging of the versions of yourself that have become too full throughout the day.

I really do regret to inform you that your own numb hand may brush your cheek,

and it may feel like someone came, and

You may make this sort of desperate, sad noise when you let your mind wander; all tears,

and on occasion, you may feel like you’re going to die; you cannot breathe in enough air and that small, quiet part of you will wither away from unuse.

You haven’t earned it yet.

I don’t know what to say to him: that I’m sorry? I don’t know how to help,

I’m sorry, okay, I did everything I could and it wasn’t enough and

I don’t know what kind of holy experience you want at 3 a.m. in your fifth childhood bedroom to make you feel whole again.

So.

I can’t do it and I don’t think anyone wants to help anymore.

It’s the same noise you make before you cry, after forgive me, father, for I have sinned,

it has been one day since my last confession

The first time you let out a noise like that, in a place of worship you carved out in the world,

you think about how corpses sometimes make a noise after they’re dead–

I imagine it’s something almost identical to that

the soul leaving the body

1/22/2026 Flu

Sick as a dog, paper

towel cold on my neck.

Sick like this, you can

imagine you’re hungover,

imagine the night before,

imagine a night certainly

more interesting than yours

in actuality. In one week,

my life will be unrecognizable,

my nose ignorantly clear. Now,

I picture my fictitious, riotous

precursor; ignore the flu

that will pass, however impossibly,

like every other thing.

[My mother tells me] On Christmas eve, all the animals can speak

Don’t get excited. You can’t wait up
for them, she says, can’t sit awake

and stare at your cat, head on, as

the clock strikes twelve, turns the

world over to Christmas Day. The

animals are shy, she says, they need

their privacy.

Now, please, go to sleep.

At midnight, there is nothing for your cat to say,

no meal to beg for, no requests to make. All the

birds outside sleep right through the night.

Business as usual. If she does try, she cannot

pronounce “privacy.” In the empty dark, she

practices her vocabulary.

Kitchen Spool

Each hour pulls at the thread. Resigned, I rise–

four times a night I wake. Now, I go barefoot down

the hallway’s throat, linger at the mouth, and decide

eventually, I will come back to bed. Now, I watch the dark around;

look above your sink. The painting I made

for you a lifetime ago returns the favor. I drink a glass of water as it boasts

familiar alabaster walls and deliberate daisies. It has not swayed,

despite everything; stays foolishly valiant in its permanent post.

I retreat into the kind

silence– sole welcome company, my half-waking peace,

a desperate retreat from steady breathing, your opine

and ceaseless rustle of the sheets.

Tonight, when I return to bed, you stir,

fumble over your words: “Where do you go?”

Moon poem

Moon was the hole punched through noon
and I went right through it,
dropped into that courtyard of blinding snow,
of surrounding clapboard, visible, safe,

from my window. Once, I swore

I could not sleep without

saying goodnight to the moon– that, true.

A pale rite before Moon swallowed

what was real. Every memory of that room

is impossibly white and hurts my eyes. I

remember being light, the way breath leaves

a mouth before a name is said, before

the fall back in. There, I drifted through hours

that never asked for morning.

I used to think I was a second chance

Not born, dropped in softly like a fix

They pinched me hard to prove I belonged here

that I had a body that could announce itself

Mostly, I looked around; thought:

is this it? All these faces waiting for a sound

At five, I drifted out of sight in a

theme park crowd felt nothing but the

soft swell of space opening around me

like a corridor that I was supposed to walk down

At nine, the world taught me its teeth

Every night since I close my eyes

pick a different door into the same beginning.

In that version, someone rushes in, looks around,

and finds me first

Narcissus

Got high then

stared into his eyes for as long as I could—

those blown-wide pupils— and

tried to imagine we were living regular life and that

he was simply happy to see me. The girl before

had marbles for eyes,

shining blue, and I couldn’t really look her for too long

without feeling sick, eaten up by

the tiny pearl of black, smack in the center,

little bead, familiar friend

in the blue. Again, and again,

three back to back to back. Every time:
I am going to stare

straight at my friend

with some sort of bizarre

masochism for that uninterested, all-telling, pin-prick.

Maybe it’s not about that. Silly me,

with my perpetually, entirely gaping pupil;

hungry, greedy, pooled-blood-black. Shame.

Must be humiliating to seemingly live within some

permanent state of desire.

Nearly there

In the shadow of the tree

You were brushing that mare

Tripping on the base of the pine–

No need to apologize

Borderline wilderness

Building your fortress

It’s a vast and gnawing abyss

Will we, or, won’t we ever

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