Poetry

your hand swells my neck, pretty, you say
i am, no matter how decimal-small. 
my eyelash flutters across your shoulder.
gravity. you land on my chest skin—

say i was a careless shutting
of language an accident
sound whirling into the guttur

The dead leaves that won’t admit they’re dead 
are called marcescent 

It was late June, the solstice. 
The day took hours to end. You look like me,
my father said quietly.

In those days when I was the academy’s darling 
I borrowed phrases and made no claims, 
digressed gracefully from every absent thesis 

We watched a movie about
an orchestral conductor, a powerful 
woman who groomed young musicians. 
I didn’t understand the ending. 
Driving to the beach, it began to rain. 

In the end 
the world is empty 
enough to move in 
—to learn how best to hold a lantern 
drunk in the forestdark— 
 

At just the age the unconscious
cheerleader was []
by four football players,
I suspect I was []
by Steve. 

She’d gathered ramps in the woods, although she found them 
A hyperbole of the food world, an over-priced scallion

With a finish of garlic scapes. But finding them in the forest, 
He thought, and picking them with her strong hands,

Steve, though he’d cut you
if you crossed him, drop you like a sack
of potatoes if you came at him drunk
like Randy Parr in the backyard,