COMMUNION

On the patio after a rain
a snail moves across the flagstone stage
like an ancient priest

finding another’s discarded shell
he solemnly stretches out his body
and seems to sniff the ghost inside
with all his senses trembling

He thrusts his thin bulk
in a swooping arabesque
around the spiral
to regard this husk of life
from a novel angle

He shrinks back
and braces against the hard earth
his body like a root of mandrake
while with brazen force he raises up the shell
reaching to heaven with half his length
he tests the weight of the thing
then down he sinks

Now he rotates the piece
and peering into the opening
he sets to work at something hidden

It is then I realize—
he is softly eating

-Hub City Emrys Prize 2017

 

WALKER CREEK

Watching a lone fisherman
in the overcast August dawn

His torso visible
through the light willow branches
against a bank of seeping clay

His cigarette spawns a small cloud
of smoke to match the fog
that feeds on this moment

Beneath him
something stole the insides
of tiny freshwater clam shells
and dropped the scraps
into the shallows

The man casts and smokes the silence
that rests on those worn out scraps

He reels in his line
and crouches

Does he pray?

He switches lures
walks upriver
lights another
and casts into the swelling stream of day.

-Hub City Emrys Prize 2015

 

MOTH

Your presence coalesced
in pearly opalescence,
weightless and wordless
as a hallucination
on dissolution’s cusp.

Darkness consumed
twigs and erased
the dusky edges of green
while a purple cabbage dreamed
translucent twilight.

Tinged with ripe fire,
you shone pallid white-
a lunar oyster burning
in a salt-starved night.

-published in Avocet, Winter 2011

 

 

ON PRESERVATION

Taxidermy thrives
like a homeopathic remedy
in small towns
that measure comfort
by adherence to tradition,
a similitude of inverse life
with death as a precursor to perpetuity,
a natural tonic too
for those who scour second-hand marts
collecting broken pocket watches.

Enter any living room
in a town of hunters
and see life suspended on every surface-
bear, bass, and buck,
but also dried Sunday palms
shrinking behind stale crucifixes
and glass grapes magnified
through crystal bowls.

Grandpa smokes loose tobacco like last Wednesday’s ash,
while Grandma opens her tabernacle purse
and offers me a necco wafer
as the scent of rose water and violet candies
rises over unlit candles.

-published in Blueline, Vol. XXXI, 2010

WHAT MY FATHER TAUGHT

He had a notion to teach it with exactitude existential,
to eclipse even shale and fossilized fern
in imprinting what ought to be learned
from moss on sycamore,
the clinging of burrs to flannel,
or frost like a needle,
also affable flood,
the mystery in lynx,
and opals in the firmament,
how to decipher
liquid dialect of walleye,
talons that chase herbivores,
and the consummate trance of mantis,
to mold in me a mind
like mushroom inviolate,
a suffusion of liminal loam
rich with spores
as immortal heirlooms.

-published in Avocet, Winter 2011

 

WINTER

At the wintertime it was a lotta snow and ice.
It’d get to where you coun’t go the road
an’ the fields were all cover’d
with snow blowed into big ol’ drifts.
Us kids would go romp around in’t.
I ‘member back in nineteen and thirty-eight
hit was the awfulest snowstorm ever I seen.
Hit was so cold we coun’t git warm
everhow we tried.
Mama boilt water and filled
a stout warshbasin and us kids set in’t.
It certain was warm in the warshbasin!
After the snow melt, we seen the fence
beside of the pasture was sigogglin
on account of the heavy snow had blowed
up agin’ it. Papa blessed out that snow
right loud when he seen the fence needs fixed.

-published in Raleigh Review, Winter 2014, issue on dialect poetry

 

GASTRONOMY OF MODERN ART

The second painting from the left
has swallowed something green.
The gallery attendant seems
not to notice, but I intuit everything.

This painting has a perverse appetite, it is clear,
the situation can only decay.
The palettes of other paintings are not safe,
save for maybe the gray.

In darkness later
through the museum
it will prowl,
oozing
like a slug
over the gardens
of Monet,
distorting
with slimy tracks
the surreal lights
of Van Gogh’s
starry café.

In the morning
quite smugly
it will hang
in the contemporary wing.

When you see it tomorrow,
keep in mind,
it is slowly digesting.

-published in Pinesong: Awards 2012, Honorable Mention, North Carolina Poetry Society Annual Contest

 

IN TEN MINUTES, EVERYTHING

3:00 There’s a tag in my dress and my neck is itchy. I bite my lip. I shift my weight. I reach behind to scratch. I try to do it casually.

3:01 I pick at my hemline. I grab at loose threads. The hem is unraveling. My best dress is unraveling and I can’t stop my fingers from pulling at things. My favorite dress is unraveling. Should I cut the string?

3:02 The clock burns. It is a burning pool of wax. Time melts and runs together and sticks there. The back of my neck is itchy.

3:03 I adjust my hair, then my belt, then my hair, then my sleeve. Now my lip is hurting.
Where’s that paperclip? A paperclip now would solve everything.

3:04 I notice the floor. On the floor are my feet. I manipulate the straps of my sandals. I consider my bare feet. I consider the cut on my heel. It’s been red for decades. I note its linearity.

3:05 I find the paperclip. I bend it out of shape. The metal digs into my fingers. I have to fight the paperclip. I have to make it straight.

3:06 What I need now is a stapler. A stapler now would be just the thing I need. Or how about some water? If only I had a drink….they make fountains for these contingencies.

3:07 That didn’t take long- should’ve gone all the way to the sink. I find the stapler. The stapler is jammed. It’s been jammed since last week.

3:08 There’s a piece of lint on the desk. One can see the lint better if one regards it at an angle of 90 degrees. I regard it at 90 degrees. The lint is green. It reminds me of your sweater, your sweater reminds me of the sea, the sea reminds me of everything.

3:09 The clock burns; time glows, a white circle. I’ve seen jellyfish trailing tentacles like living strings. They’re translucent, effervescent, beautiful, but I’m pretty sure they sting. This poison is ancient. It supersedes you and me.

3:10 The back of my neck is itchy.

-published in Independent Weekly, Feb. 22, 2012, Second Place Award, Indy Annual Poetry Contest

 

I DID NOTHING

a gauzy substance
layered upon life
is the day

an old wound

when I make my report
I will say

I did nothing
but let the sun move
across the sky

indifferent

in a phantom
war without sides

-published in The Main Street Rag, Fall 2011

 

BITE

The man behind me
bit into an apple.
I heard his teeth tear the fruit’s flesh twice-
breaking the skin
opening an ivory window.

I leaned into the roughness
and thought of scrimshaw,
the sea on rocks,
and the way a sailor squints
into a sky,
boundless.

-published in When Women Waken, 2014, Delight

 

SNOW DAY

It strains against the side
of my consciousness
with a mechanical whir and drag.
Lumbering through muted morning ice,
it exists first as a heavy half-sound
climbing the dark hills in my dreams
until the gravelly scrape
of welcome metal on macadam
tears me awake.
In the tight, warm blackness
of a winter bed,
a flame of awareness
washes
my sleep-chilled face.
Slowly,
I register
a dim room,
the radiator’s working whine,
the little crack and split
of a dry wooden floor,
and the plow outside my window,
the ponderousness of the plow
groping for a cause,
a reason to celebrate-
could it be
could it possibly be
a snow day?!

-published in When Women Waken, 2014, Delight

 

MY LIZARD RUNS

He is on the leaf, my lizard,
on the leaf, he is green.

(By which I mean, he is discrete.)

He is on the wooden rail, my lizard,
on the rail, he is gray.

(By which I mean, he has changed.)

He is on the flowerpot, my lizard,
he is terracotta on the pot.

(By which I mean, he likes to play.)

He lifts his chin,
he narrows his eyes,
he cocks his head
to the side…

My lizard runs, and
whenever he runs,

he runs!

(To this action he commits most fully.)

-published in When Women Waken, 2014, Delight