Category: Poetry

Up here, it’s a haunted house

“‘… up here’ –she gestured to her head– ‘it’s a haunted house.’” – Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow.

We flew across the country to bury your ashes by your eldest daughter's plot. There was a barbecue in your niece's backyard that week, where your extended family — our extended family, I guess — gathered to see each other and share their memories of you. It was a sunny day, mid-July; I was exhausted. I took a nap on a loveseat in the empty living room. Like you had done during family gatherings when you were alive.

Water is boiling in an electric kettle on top of a file cabinet behind my desk. I pour it into a mug covered with titles of commonly banned books. I dig a teabag out of the drawer of the cabinet I emptied of files and filled with tea, coffee grounds, and snacks. I dunk the teabag in the water, watch the brown cloud stretch, grow. Steam sways like a wind chime's mallet in an autumnal flurry. Every few minutes, you remind me to take a sip, so I don't have to microwave it like you needed to near the end.

When I was in elementary school, I walked to your house when the school day ended. It was a cold, dark winter. I watched cartoons while working on math homework — simple multiplication, I think. You made me hot cocoa by microwaving a mug of milk, squirting in chocolate syrup, and twirling whipped cream on top. Did you add a cherry? Did you keep a jar of maraschino cherries in your fridge? I don't remember.

One of my students asks me to see their choir concert. I put it in my calendar to make sure I can attend. I arrive early, park in the same spot I left two hours earlier. I sit in the room where students ate lunch six hours earlier. They have a solo during the final song. My heart is full, my eyes teary. This must be a fraction of what you felt during my concerts. You tell me to help put chairs away when the concert ends. I tell them how proud I am of them and their performance. They introduce me to their family. You tell me how proud you are of me as I drive home.

It was spring. My mother, your younger daughter, buried some of your ashes along the edge of her yard which overlooks a small creek (which exists when it rains for a day or two). You are split between two sides of a continent; flowers bloom around your name every year.

a test proctor

silence

thirty students and laptops
along the room's perimeter

a pile of backpacks
between the door and a bookcase

fingers on keyboards
like rain on a sidewalk

warm, stagnant air
of early afternoon

five heads on desks
between hoods and forearms

cold coffee in a thrift-store mug
by the keyboard on your desk

a pencil eraser on a desk
120 beats per minute

a whisper
a nod

silence

A Logical Conclusion of Hypochondria

Floaters crawl across an overcast sky.
Maybe your retinas are about to detach.
One day, you won’t be able to see anyway.

A cramp in your calf wakes you in the middle of the night. 
Feels like a mountain lion’s teeth ripping meat from bone.
One day, you won’t be able to walk anyway.

Hollowness erupts in your wrist halfway through typing an email.
You bend and stretch to fill the void.
One day, you won’t be able to type anyway.

A feeling in your chest like an icepick in your heart.
Each breath hurts. Is it your heart? Your lungs?
One day, you won’t be able to breathe anyway.

You can’t remember the word that describes this feeling.
It’s behind a fog rolling over a harbor.
One day, you won’t be able to remember anyway.

every tree on the coast

every tree on the coast
leans inland,
stretches their branches
toward the hills away
from shore.
what do they know?

On a Beach in Astronomical Twilight

It's just so improbable, you know?
Those stars are thousands of lightyears away.

That would mean
these photons flew here, voyagers,
trillions of miles, from a home they'll never return to,
and nothing got in their way.

They didn't stop at another planet,
get eaten by another star,
collide with an asteroid,
or freeze in a comet's tail.

These photons sailed right here,
into our eyes,
uninterrupted
for millennia.

Light bent in the right way
for us to see
remnants of an ancestor whose name is
probably a series of numbers in a spreadsheet.

And, we get to see these photons,
but not the ones who arrive later
or earlier,
not the ones caught by an overcast sky.

We only see the ones
who flew from those stars to this specific spot,
as our planet corkscrews around a different star
whose eye is currently caught mid-blink.

It's infinitesimal, these odds; these stars, their light,
and us, lying on a beach in astronomical twilight.

i feel like a ghost town.

i feel like a ghost town.
empty buildings
with shuttered windows
around a patchy courtyard.
no wind, no rain,
nothing here
anymore.

the big game

sun crawls toward a snow-capped ridge.

someone’s built snowpeople
on top of the frozen pond.

the moon hides behind trees
doing their morning stretches.

a fire pit, half-buried, watches the sky change
from blue-black to peach to grey.

engines from the highway
mix with the yawn from the forest,
mix with the whisper from the stream underfoot.

breakfast with a bald eagle

downed spruce trunk
under green water
a steady current
rain drops on
their cloud’s reflection

on the riverbank
a bald eagle
beak-deep in a
pink salmon carcass
under its talon

thick fog in
the tree line
at the foot
of the mountain
slow as dawn

a call from
a nearby fir
the rhythm of
a playing card
between bicycle spokes

frantic brown wings
into the air
forsaken salmon flesh
on the shore
for the seagulls

Feminist Masculinity

After Feminism Is for Everybody, by bell hooks.

You are 32.
On your way to work, you listen to an audiobook
where bell hooks talks about
how difficult it is to teach boys feminism,
how feminist masculinity is often ignored
for simplified narratives of blame and finger pointing
rather than rebuilding society.

You are 27.
During an English department meeting, 
a colleague from another school remarks 
how good you are at
being the only man in the room.

You are 25.
On your daily walk around your neighborhood,
your dad calls.
He tells you about his family, the latest news about your cousin,
how nonsensical it is
her best friend to be a man.

You are 17.
You work in the kitchen of a restaurant.
You mostly interact with servers, 
most of whom are women.
It is taken as a truism:
women get better tips than men; you belong in the kitchen.

You are 12.
During your sixth-grade class’s sex ed. unit,
your teacher talks about
biological differences between boys and girls.
She singles you out for being a boy with long eyelashes,
a trait associated with girls.

You are seven.
Your mom is driving you home from daycare.
You ask her about her day.
She tells you about work you don’t understand,
coworkers that frustrate her.
You ask her if her coworkers are her friends.
She tells you men and women
just can’t be friends.

Can’t Find the Words

After Swing, by Kwame Alexander and Mary Rand Hess.

The nation's pulse
can be found in
Charles Mingus's fingers
walking on an upright bass.

There's so much I want to
say to you,
so much I can't
find words for.

Have you ever heard Coltrane
run up and down a scale,
then deconstruct every rule
you thought you knew?

You're right in front of me,
but I can't reach you–
my hands trapped in my pockets,
my throat dry as August sun.