Copihue: Sin palabras This is a Spanish and English poem I wrote years ago but published in 2022. It's based on a Lorca poem called "La luna asoma." The back and forth between the two languages is supposed to be confusing and is meant to highlight the necessity for presence that exists beyond the bounds of language.
Zetetic: A Record of Unusual Inquiry: Don't Worry About the World This poem stems from my contemplation of our various associations with certain colors.
Zetetic: A Record of Unusual Inquiry: I Am Drawn I wrote this the day before Yom Kippur, so fasting was on my mind, which made me think about what it means to be taken care of and nourished.
Scarlet Leaf Review Winged Sycophants - A poem written at a time when I was feeling particularly frustrated and helpless. (Trump had recently been elected.)
Your Windows - I wrote this not long after I'd finished my thesis Bard College, which included poetry inspired by Federico García Lorca. I feel there's a Lorquian twinge to this poem, mixed with melancholy at a love-situation gone sour.
La vida de una abuela sola - This is taken from the thesis mentioned above and is inspired by Lorca as well as a sad, old woman I lived with in Spain.
When You Leave - If only we could be happy all the time... Beauty v. Love - I'm still trying to figure out what this poem means. I wrote it long ago when half asleep.
Treehouse Arts: How Life Works (The website is currently down, so please see the poem below.) This is about peculiarity and artificiality. I jotted it onto a scrap of paper while sitting in the grass of a recently mowed lawn.
How Life Works We sleep on beds with legs instead of moss on the ground where soil soothes dreams. We rake leaves. We do not leave them to decompose and recompose like jigsaw pieces rebuilding Earth. We mow lawns and keep them strictly green even though so many other colors exist. Some deluded soul once said that grass surpassed monarchs and milkweed.
Slink Chunk Press: Onboard (The website is currently down, so please see the poem below.) A fleeting, "romantic" encounter inspired this poem, but I tried to let it extend beyond the encounter itself. It attempts to convey the timidity that I (and others) feel when it comes to expressing needs and desires. I began writing it while studying with Terrance Hayes at a writer's conference at Stonybrook in July, 2014. Hayes prompted us to write a poem that starts in one place and takes the reader somewhere else completely.
Onboard Your nose softer as the night progressed soft and when you smiled it spread buttery the blubber of a seal asleep and your eyes I could have touched but didn’t a blue that warmed to yellow when you spoke lashes alive and me I just stared at my fingers that gripped the table’s edge like it was a boat my fingers pressed straining to get on board and when you laughed the table shook and I shivered almost like crashing to shore I shivered but still holding on white fingertips white knuckles but your face was a rosy smear somewhere in vision’s horizon a small wine sunset in thinning candlelight almost extinguished by the waves of your laughter and my shivers your soft nose stretching from one ear to the other my drumming ears muffling everything you said until you thought we’d talked long enough and it was time to see your beach house. Your beach house was tall and black in the night. There was no view of the sea. I wanted time to write a list of pros and cons. I wanted to interview and your mother maybe your brother, as well, if you had one. I wanted you to know that I wore mismatched socks, that I loved to draw pictures of fish and to make apple omelets. But there was no time, and when it was over you held me like we were in love and I told you my last name and I thought of the time when I was five and I went to the neighbor’s house and she had cake on the table chocolate, my favorite, and she asked me if I liked school and I hid behind my father’s leg and she asked me if the cat had my tongue and I wanted to ask for cake but couldn’t.