Poetry

Keep Silent and Let Me Speak

                      after Job When no one is here, I eat all the cheesecake with my unwashed hands. I’ve forgotten what my face looks like, as I will forget yours. I feel a pounding, sharp wings or stones shaking, African violets. Branches—what grows there? At night I sleep on a couch near… Read more →

Grandfather’s Clocks

My grandfather creates clocks, grandfather clocks, and it seems unpoetic now though it used to seem ironic and canny, before I knew what irony was, before I’d read Freud and swore off meat and milk on Mondays for the boys out to war. He converted his daughter’s doll room into a clock repair shop, gears and glass faces spilling out… Read more →

Two Sketches of My Son

He offers his doll milk, tends to her the way he is tended to: wet kiss, skitter touch, murmur. Before language there is gesture. He holds her— arms wrapped around cloth body, pressed to his small chest— the way I held him in the NICU: fiercely, as if he was bargain instead of grace. \\ He crouches over pinecone and… Read more →

My Son Eats A Salad (Orlando, June 12, 2016)

He calls it a vegan grief binge: a whole head of lettuce dismembered leaves bodies strewn under disco lights. What music was playing? ED? Indie? Whimsy? Nothing whimsical about this day. He chops cucumbers, carrots; adds almonds for protein, mint for the taste of tears. Across the field, cows yawn in the barn, lazy as they approach the robot milkers…. Read more →

In a Dream

My brother doesn’t exist.         No one has to listen         to him detail the inner grooves of the chamber,         how the recoil         jams your shoulder joint No one has to know         the difference         between wounds & wounds. No… Read more →

Vespers

I walk through cold streets my face to waning sun and step into a café to order something warm and be among people, to wonder about them— what a marvel people of like strangeness find each other. And how odd it is that we show love with fingertips, bear the darkest parts we hide from everyone else. And how even… Read more →

Memorial Site

He was into Bob Marley, so his parents chose reggae as the theme.  A red-, yellow- and green-striped flag with “We Are Free” marks the scene—a break easily missed in the twisted road that flanks the high Galilee. His mom offers bracelets, with “We are Free” for the taking. He took that flag to the army. A missile hit his… Read more →