Category: Poetry

is not your typical song and dance. The music is drowning down by the river. The old soft shoe is more soggy than not. It is nothing like tap dancing, but more like one log or stump chucked into the water after another. With...

Between one breath and the next, that quick, that labored. The snow having fallen, fallen, fallen into flakes and all the mistakes having melted with them. Dissolved, if not absolved of them. The fingers still drumming the taut...

That I made a better door than a window, but I just couldn’t open up that way. That my eyes were the windows to my soul—yes, my beady, unblinking hazel eyes—them. That I had a beautiful soul, blessed in ordinary shades of Rio...

This rain comes to the bog on kitten paws that pitter pat pitter pat across the matted-down grasses and mosses. Little prickly claws that pierce with thin slivers of shiver. Suddenly, the bog’s sod is sodden. Rain’s excess...

At first, I held tight to the pain, to each jolt that stabbed, then ravaged my wasting limbs. Until I felt nothing but the bog’s lips smacking against my skin, hungry as kisses. Only the brain remains, furtive, holding to the...

imagine feathers on my head on my neck across my back downy cheeked my beaky nose. imagine the way I’d have to fold my wings to even get into the car. Hurry with this swishing tail before the door closed. Never twice. Imagine...

June’s fiercest sun burned her arms & her feet where they peeked from those most foolish shoes. It was time to can strawberries, to fill the kitchen with heat, fly-sweet, & long for a breeze. She didn’t like strawberry...

The year was lost. The whole thing buried with a pitchfork, first a stab & twist a lank of grass, then a stab of dirt. Roots. Keep going. More dirt, sour and salty, then the gray rime of clay & gravel. Make it bigger....

I can’t be everything to anyone I’m just enough for me

I’m going to let the tears flow not wipe my eyes when the moisture blurs my vision I’m going to let the tears flow while the tears stain my cheeks and roll past my lips gather at the base of my chin then drop slowly I’m going to...

for Langston Hughes I sing America, too. At the Intersection: the line between black and white. The lighter sistah at the table now, while the darker one laughs, eats, grows stronger As her beauty burgeons, She, he, and “I” sing...

Steelworker, lover of cars (he exchanged these often), lover of women (he was faithful to one), fast friend, storyteller nonpareil, improver of homes by both hands and his presence. Who sang in church loudly and off-key before...