Meeting Yourself

Rummaging in my stuff recently, I found my first masters’ thesis, the one from 1982.
The first sentence was simple enough, the second less so, and, after that, the syntax and language became so muddy I couldn’t trudge through it. I gave up, convinced someone else must have written it, [...]

Haiku Sonnet: After Closing

His job is to sweep
beneath tables floating like
a floor laid on air.
Chairs perched upside down
look over his progress as
he shepherds a crowd
of crumbs in shadow.
The manager and his wife
dip heads in prayer
to love. Before he
reaches them, their hands signal
goodnight. Keys jingle
faintly as they walk away,
locking him inside.

Laughing Gas

I heard once that levels of nitrous oxide—N2O—are rising nearly one hundred fold in the Arabian Sea. Before that instant, I thought of N2O as laughing gas, the stuff dentists use to anaesthetize patients. I didn’t know nitrous oxide existed in nature, and I soon discovered it doesn’t much. [...]

My Attempt at a Ghazal*

Impatiens mount into a pyre, life’s desire.
Red gasping flames never tire life’s desire.
In bed, sheets raise a wall of fog to hide a choir.
But your laughter riffles dawn’s lyre, life’s desire.
The planets streaking through space will arc no higher.
Mobiles spinning sideways without wire, life’s desire.
The sea’s a ground for dropped gold and gems to mire.
And [...]

Pencils and Poems

At the bidding of one of my MFA teachers, I once read a 400 plus page book on pencils, Henry Petroski’s The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance. I remember writing a snarky introduction when I responded to the book. It amounted to, “What the hell was [...]

Haiku Sonnet: The Word For It

All objects are made
yours by use, each one a doll
of your affection.
At the end of chains
pocket watches twist, speaking
their one utterance,
prayer machines sewing
time together and forming
sentences.  Which day
will words change  into
the things they name?  Not today.
Bodies float in space,
their umbilicals pulled taut,
beaming hushed messages home.

An Open Letter to My Former Teachers

It’s time for me to return to teaching again, but before I do, I want to thank you.
I didn’t know I owed you this debt until just now…because we don’t always ask questions when they ought to occur to us. When I was in school, I never asked, “Who here matters?” If someone else [...]

The Sphinx After Oedipus

Time passed is a diamond
too like sand to be found:
when he flees, she
sifts the last hour
to find its remnants.
She remembers wind
throbbing in echo,
the mirage of fabric in her fists,
a scorched tongue. Nothing
remains but absence.
She touches her wound
to confirm the loss.

Carrying Capacity

With school starting Monday, I’m in my last hours of summer, lamenting a list of accomplishments so much shorter than my list of ambitions, regretting unfinished (and unstarted) tasks. I’m not even close to being ready and really shouldn’t be writing this post. But here I am.
A smaller version of [...]

Casualties

The kitchen air is fragrant with cream
cheese kuchen. One piece missing,
its circle still sinks a white table
buoyant with sun. She stands, one palm
pressed to the window, her mind smoothing
memory’s cowlicks, recalling the postmark
birthmark on her son’s arm. His room upstairs
holds just light. No one rises. Morning discloses
scuffs along the baseboards, [...]