It was the memory of returning home.
The night won’t leave me alone for my
forgetfulness, I lost my favorite red shoes
somewhere, by the river side, when we swam
to the center of it, and listened to the way
water sounds, inside.
The braids of purple flowers around my wrist
enchanted me. The decadence of spring,
before it’s ascent through […]

My father built me a boat.
A small wooden boat
to ride on the back of the sea.
Sea roads, sea houses,
sea bridges, sea fields
breaks open like white flowers.
Break me with the rhythm of water
the tide
the tide breaks a thousand orange mornings.
The ocean records this rising, this falling.
My little boat sinks deep, deeper than
a deep sea diver.
My father’s […]

White as the shoulders of snowdrops,
the chest of a folding wave,
your mouth, white vapors of clouds-
What I swallowed, I wasn’t afraid of.
Like Icarus as he ascended, like a magnet pulled
by his love for the sun.
They say at every ending there is a beginning.
And so, when the wings, begin to melt,
I fall fast.
Would you tell […]

after The Afternoon Sun by C. P. Cavafy
This room, how well I know it.
This room, my tree-house, my nest
made of the breath of books,
sweat from watercolors,
in the shadow of branches
cast across 240 sunrises
now rented, packed up,
folded and tucked
in boxes, the sunrise still
seeps out.
This house, a double memory.
It is familiar like, photographs of daffodils […]

So much like the bending bare branches
of the tree, early January,
it’s hard to hide much
in winter.
In secret, someone writes my name
in black ink, over and over again,
and runs it beneath water.
I am born, and fade. It goes on like this.
This liturgy of the hours.
I left my journal in someone else’s bed
with drawings of trees, quotes […]

Snow hit like a wind chime.
Wildness building a nest
in soprano tones, this arctic
woven from the silk of kimonos,
the father of the crane,
bearing red fruit
in his beak for his young.
The way i can’t sleep anymore.
The night whispers to me
fledgling songs:
for the first time
my wish, to stay.
Who needs to be big and strong
to make this flight across […]

We’re driving on a backroad,
somewhere upstate, late night.
You were telling me the story
of a ghost of an old woman,
who appeared to travellers
on nights just like this.
We stop the car, waiting,
heads of magnolia bowing
nearby, heavy with spring:
we snap photos. I don’t remember
who it was, who was standing there
beside me then, who I was writing
so many […]

after reading a headline about a murderer found, and then bumping into her family member over a cash counter buying coffee

It’s a haunting: how undecided one feels
about snow. Haunting how it
covers your shoulders and erases
lines between things.
So I am quiet as quiet does, silent with it
as silent does, while the birds come in flocks
mid-day, and […]

Silver, the water
I wear, I stream down
the mountain, past the steeple,
past the place where they bow,
they bow, oh how they bow,
like heavy blue flowers,
cornflowers, color of the silk,
in my hair, in love with nothing
but the movement, what falls behind,
is the tremble, your hands,
the branches I catch in,
when we were young,
we folded paper sail boats
and raced […]

is force-light,
barefoot,
slow motion,
camera,
over mood,
so blue,
with oceania,
with constellation
mouth,
with strike
and stroke
of lightning,
is feather foot,
falling from trees,
is beneath it sitting,
in shade, and knee deep
in yellow, they are flowers,
hands are triumphs
of birds, and lift,
oh the lifting, lift me so,
this quiet, it is clocks and sleep,
with dreams who wake from dreams
at night, i see, us all, pearl-bellied,
flocked and […]