Poetry

Sometimes, a teacher proposes / we write about something / insignificant, or a friend requests // that poems and posts not get so  / political.

In the Old Dictator’s obituary, a charming anecdote—

When the Old Dictator was a boy, his father saved his wages
for a month to buy his son a watch.

We have come together, the Board Chair begins,
for obvious reasons. In a time of great division, this table—
he raps his knuckles against the oak
for emphasis

Please scream / inside your heart: hold / your terror, your errors, your // regrets apart / from those around you.

They call it kneading / as in dough or massage, this act // of pawing at my bathrobe / by kittens.

Of course they sing—/ we have given them / no other verb.

Absent bounty, anarchic and asymptotic, / Bedlam banked as beauty, captive cuckolding / Capital and its camel-faced captor, master, the / Devil is in the dove’s details

A is for almost, arriving, my father’s death. / B is for bear, which he does and does not do. / C is for care and critics and leaving them to their caskets.

I think I lost the genetic lottery, / my cousin told me // in one of the last conversations / we had

My daughter learns I’m there / even when I am not. I name this trust