In the Three Bear Cottage
My Mother Falls in Love with her Nest Wings

doesn’t need to travel so far anymore
finds the foam in the day’s heaving
as if desertion is a petrified tongue
an annotation between forgiveness
and lusting after heaven.

St. Jude never saved us
with his ivory robes and thin shoes.
We buttressed the house up with stick pins
curly cue pillows
three beds for the bears who would come in
late night, their bodies slurring.
In May, they’d trundle off to capture the first
of the choke berries blooming.

Finally she built a nest here of sorts.
Stick gum and rushes, left over candle wax
birch twigs buried beside the yard swing.
Twined it all together
made a home
softer than the tongues of men who
carried her body off each night
then migrated away.

My mother hives with the honeybees.
Doesn’t need to travel far anymore
or clog her head with useless devotions.
Even in the midst of winter, the sheen
of her soaked wings
flame.

From Bandits Come and Remove My Mother's Body in the Night

First appeared in Praire Schooner

I am impregnated

with five castoff shoes
two pairs and an odd remnant.
The city has shabby rooms in it.
They are coal fires burning behind
a perfect grate.
Sometimes my life goes missing.
Permeable girls who disappear
summer evenings
dangle their legs
when the tongue of the river
can't get enough of them.

Lucretius says infinity
is a glass slipper
with unceremonious roses in it,
that street lamps burn forever
inside the warmth of the bulb's gaze
burn past the night's flint black
hold on them.
What we bind to us
lives on in the mercy of our hands.

I cupboard glass jars
spawn a storehouse of children
make the night a matchstick
of prayers burning
lounge in my lover's body
as if longing can couple soup cans
erase my mother's early dismissal
the stockpile of coupons
she saved for me.

From Fast as Lightning

First appeared in Rhino

Mary Jo

Mary Jo wore a colored bandana
over her hair
banana yellow
not to go with her shoes
but to set them off
like little fire engines
with flames on them.

Three weeks past her First Communion
God came for her with his torn wings.
I remember the date - May 15th.
Two months before my eighth birthday.
I remember the envelope of happiness
she always dug out of the yard's damp fist
as if there was no father chucking beer cans
no mother with yellowed teeth
tobacco stained hands.

We played hide and seek
once the clothesline of days lengthened.
I could nver find her.
She knew how to grow so small
she could erase herself behind tree limbs
inside boxes, shelf drawers
till one day she wouldn't be here anymore.

Is it a comfort to become invisible?
My father says not everybody is meant to breath
the shrunken air here
live their days with even shoelaces
a scarcity of shade.
That sometimes it is the rarefied space
that saves us
like metal crucifixes
plastic bags.

She chose a plastic bag.
Its clear circumference.
Tied one over her head
tried to find that perfect bubble
she could live in.
A membrance so impenetrable
you could outlast the rain.

From Chosen

First appeared in Slipstream

His Coffee Stained Map of the World

The young girl with no socks
has streaked lemon in her hair,
wears cut-offs, a midriff shirt
that highlights the curvature of her breasts.
She knows this walkway
takes it beside the fishing boats -
The Misty Maiden, The Thirsty Scupper,
Miss Bertie, The Chelsea Rose -
gathers small glimpses of the young man
with the banded black hair
and ancient nose.
He hauls herring, guts tuna, hoses
fish heads off the dock.

There are lives that bust early,
get put back together again.
Face lines that are rigged hard, taut,
tied, sometimes crippled, by the sea.
He finishes his shift at four.
Loyally she waits for him on the bench
in the front of the tavern
where the dock workers stagger in
weary for their pint of ale.

For two months now he has
shown her his coffee stained
map of the world.
She is drunk on his sweat, his sweetmeats
the crashing waves of his wider sea.
There is no place his fingers
won't take her to,
no place his fingers won't
mine.

From Here

First appeard as contest finalist, Oberon

After the Dinner at Constantine's
and the Accursed Salutation of Roses

When five people sat at the table
to discuss Borges
I was rudely absent
not in body but in boldness
in the quantifiable leaps that make
language lounge confidently
in thin air.
Oysters on the half shell. Escargot.
A tariff of insignias
that bleed the day's pincushions
and remind us of lost virginity
the simple meal at the silent
table.

That night when I unbuttoned
my shirt for you - it was I
who was grateful
grateful to let words - the past -
slip away
find those other iolatries that
shepherd sin
make it safe here.
We of the midnight branches of
the spindly bow tree.
My tongue rehearsing its beauty on your
body's swollen sleeves.

This other tuition I live by.

From Perishing in the Rain