By Heart

After all these years your phone number is the only one I remember by heart, a glass paperweight sea-green, swirling red on the desktop of my head.

Come To My Attention

It has come to my attention you’ve accustomed yourself to women docile and compliant, sweet in their silence as they are obeisance, pale, neatly plaited and attractive in conservative, woolen caps– one of which I am not. Never have you met the likes of an ocean crashing within a human rib cage. Never have you […]

october haiku

no haunt’s more savage than a sudden ghost of love who will not forgive

Missed Connection

In opposing moments we passed one another, suspended as i was with a dragonfly as leaves fluttered from sleepy trees. I looked back, the moment loomed, long, shadowed, and i missed you. Questions curl in my chest- do i feel your breath or your absence, endless in autumn sky?

Snow Fell

Last night snow fell. The poem I read at your wedding came to mind, and I drifted to sleep in blanketed hush, warm, while you lie, fingers curled and hardened, beneath frozen layers. Sometimes I tell myself I have no right to grieve as hard as I do. Maybe we weren’t all that close. Maybe […]

Crocodile

Did you ever see them feed crocodile at a park? Meat on a hook, dangling over a pit above snapping jaws? That is my twisting soul- raw flesh gleams, about to be devoured. ——- I tuck my daughter into layers of fleece and flannel. She clutches her cat’s white fuzz against her cheek. Mama loves […]

Break

Morning breaks, and with it my heart again for all things said unsaid, undone, again for all moments we spent alone, apart. It breaks more times than it can even beat.

You Missed

I am not good at math, never bothered to calculate how many heartbeats between melt and skip and break. Perhaps a million palpitations pulsated, or maybe only a dozen. Regardless, every one represented a chance for you to glance back and offer to mend. All these chances you missed, maybe a million, or maybe only […]

Did You Think of Me?

Green

Lilac bush budded tight, not yet ready to let go of winter, to trust the conductor’s flailing baton, urging it to open to the next movement of our quartet. Your fist was like that, over your sternum as you claimed “it” was all still there. I snap off a twig. Inside, the flesh is green. […]