words to share: published poems and an upcoming book
Image Journal A prayer for Home, Creed in the Santa Ana Winds, On Lazarus
Missouri Review Resistance
Storyscape Journal Before Doors, Door Two
Rattle Poetry Shame at Eight
Prairie Schooner What is Left Behind
Poet Lore After the Ultrasound, On Creation, Love
Aurorean Longing, Asgard Without You
Portland Review My Father Who Holds the World
Smartish Pace Fight
The Baltimore Review If You Could Grieve
After the Ultrasound
French fries burn my fingers
and I lick the salt, holding
an icy coke between my knees
as I drive. The body was black
and bucking, a mouth
biting fingers, a caterpillar spine,
fingerprints set, the whole thing
just longer than a fig.
I am driving under a sky
broken wide with late morning,
there’s sun on the dash,
on the windshield, sun
glinting in a thousand shards
in the asphalt, gleaming
off the ocean just behind
the nodding oil rigs
and A&P strip mall,
sun tangling in my hair
because for now
we are golden, that body
slipped silently into mine
and held there as the glassy ocean
breaks shape and the sky
nearly falls under such light.
My Father Who Holds the World
When I walk into the bathroom, the small TV
on the counter speaks the 6 o'clock news
and my father is at the sink. I sit balanced
on the lip of the tub watching him,
like I did as a girl, run the razor across
his soft cheeks, over his Adam’s apple
along his jaw. He stands with his hands
on either side of the basin, tension silenced
in his shoulders as he leans toward the mirror.
I am memorizing the slope of his forehead,
the shape of his watch, imprinted on his wrist.
On Creation
The wonder is not
in making something from nothing,
the wonder is God
shattering himself
to become word
made river, made blue jay, made stone.
The wonder is not
seven days, but that on day six
God left language to use his hands,
formed the human
and breathed into him
until flesh came.
The wonder is not
how the man must have screamed
as dirt forced from new lungs,
but how we shudder now to think
that we alone
were not spoken but touched,
that we alone were left
with a chestful of God’s breath.
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