POEMS
We Who Carry Air
There are days that wake you
beginning and end.
As a south-facing porch.
No matter the bags to be carried
from the car,
the memories or dreams
vying for attention lest they slip away,
no matter at all,
because there will be nights when the crack
is bone-deep and you’re too far away
to search for marrow, you will still bolt upright
in your frame. A body will gasp
no matter the hour. Air will move through
any open entry. How keyless this gust. God,
to be alive:
How rare to hand-cup the soil.
What skeletons beneath our skin—we who carry
air—how alive we are, how made of earth.
—Bellevue Literary Review, issue. 45 — Taking Care, print
A Woman Strolls by a Table with a Warm Apricot Atop
A woman warms into certain forms like an apricot tree.
I watch the baby’s pincer grip strengthen.
I listen to the toddler title himself.
One day I have milk stains on my only clean dress,
years later—
my skin, like the nodes of the moon
around my bones, muscle, and sinew,
strolls into this form and that form.
In the mother culture, we live
when lived by.
The skin of the apricot is warm, sitting on the table in the sun.
The seed of the apricot cannot name itself, but I name it my child.
—Southern Humanities Review, issue vol. 56 no. 4, print
Affirming Everydayness
Everydayness is the center of an axis:
both quiet and practical.
When the ancient grandmothers
walked this earth, barefoot, their feet,
elegant, callused, met the first orchard keepers
tending the knobby roots, the blossoming elbows.
They knew the ordinary made way for fruit,
the way timelessness measures everything,
one primal form atop another.
I walk now, wanting to appreciate each movement,
to allow my feet to earn their layers
every naked step.
—Bellevue Literary Review, issue. 45 — Taking Care, print
One Hundred Haiku in One Hundred Days, 15 January 2024, ongoing.
FORTHCOMING
“The Calligrapher,” print, Frogpond, the Journal of the Haiku Society of America, issue 47:2
PUBLISHED
“A Woman Strolls by a Table with a Warm Apricot Atop,” print, Southern Humanities Review, issue 56.4
“We Who Carry Air,” and “Affirming Everydayness,” print, Bellevue Literary Review, issue. 45 — Taking Care