2024 + 2025 poems

Happy Mother’s Day, I Promise

Despair rarely harbors itself here.
Keenly aware when someone is not a worthy match.
A mindful boxer who relaxes the gloves
to let his opponent stagger
and sway,
considering if the occasion truly calls for another strike.
Or maybe, like blood moon skies in this aging universe,
I am just too
preoccupied to notice
when someone is turning out the lights.

Today,
it’s the single-blade razor
leaving an ingrown hair on my cheek,
and the fact that someday no one will remember how my
legs once tread against second city streets.
And the conversations those passing faces shared
about home winemaking
as if they were the first
to unfasten stems and split open grapes.

In that same way,
as I trim and prune these poems and pick
the plump, unscarred words
The ones that nearly release themselves from the vine.
Avoiding things like corner bakeries
And Christmas at Macey’s
I want more, but I am less
If you feel lost in what traffic is left,
just know
that at one point
there was so much more of me.

Like the crumbled church on Jefferson
that came down tonight without a soul knowing.
Architecture composed a century ago
Welcoming a century’s worth of sun
Through stained glass windows
that witnessed
So many despair and grow
And stand
and drink down grapes

It’s hearing her state
in the past tense,
“I always was a pretty good actress.”

And the similar desperation that washes over me like decades
when I think about weeds reclaiming brick sidewalks.
The doom of paint chips flaking from pantry shelves,
pared off like splinters from knives
Shawn and I used to whittle in the woods.

There, between the trees that you loved
With an affection that glimmered in each tear
Shed as the timbers staggered
And swayed
After a century of
Daylight filtering through their limbs
Striking the pages of letters you wrote before there
was anything of me.

I have always wanted to love like you
to have fallen
not far from those oak branches

And there’s still time to learn
because,
you’re not even young yet
and your sharp eyes needle the whisker free.



UPY2K

My parents were unconvinced
that computers forgetting how to use their calendars
would bring our demise,
but we still had Y2K food storage in our garage
and we still piled into the Suburban
headed north.

It was just after Christmas.
We took our favorite presents with us.

That bridge was our Narnia wardrobe,
transporting us to a mysterious spot
where we were warned not to wander too far
into the woods because a rapist lived there.
His hideout huddled between black spruce
and empty hound dog boxes

And we carried pocket knives in Michigan
and held our own at the Shipwreck and every stretch of forest

contained snowmobile trails that siren-called us.
Abandoned hunting lodges, battered shacks,
and the inhospitable homes of trappers who,
through chattering teeth,
would babble on about how the arduous nature of life
was occasionally suspended by a memorable kill


now captured in gray staged photographs.
Tales that grew like campfire flames.

Our home away from home was a log cabin
that had been modernized as much as
anything in that forgotten land.
White siding and duck hunt wallpaper.
Steep stairs that creaked under footsteps
far more than the ice on that forever frozen lake.

We didn’t buy into the notion that
widespread chaos was ever on the horizon,

but upon learning that previous occupants
had buried a fortune in the basement walls,
all we wanted to do was dig.
Dad discovered a few dirt encrusted coins,
but my fortune from that musty space were
his empty beer bottles that my brother and I


would exchange at the video store down the hill
for ten cents apiece.

A rickety emporium
where we repeatedly rented Little Giants
and purchased Take Off Your Pants and Jacket.
A dime at a time
our burgeoning movie quote vocabularies
and song lyric languages were born.

Could I squint hard enough
to pull the leading lines of Main Street back together?

There,
on the lakefront,
maybe the neon bulbs of the Tally-Ho would reignite.
Would the rush of Upper Peninsula air
somehow bind together these lifetimes
like the frozen fish filets stacked in the shanty?

Sometimes a place can become a ghost
even if I can still hear the call of the wild,

and feel the frigid twigs
snapping beneath the weight of the sled.


Martha

your bench
a blank sheet
a mind fervently fumbling over
life and all of the decisions
that require
patient articulation

as small as it sounds
i wish i sat next to you
close enough to hear you sing
close enough to smell the flavor of your
snapping gum as you stood
stoic beneath the strains
unbothered by the chemical
encircled by the cure

and i hope
someone still has that sound
that they carry it
and will eternally
raise and lower your
expectations,
and pillows,
and swinging voices

in a hushed room bent for prayer
the downcast faces of
expressionist poetry
more hope than fear
more acquainted with the richness of the past
than the fragmented photo albums to come

and the impact of your
motionless
presence
still stirred these locked legs
to stand in silent vigil
never quite able to net
measured words in that
consolation haze of

cigarette smoke and
monarch milkweed
death and life
intertwined
before me



High Heat in Hanoi

Jack started smoking in the army
so that he could catch a break.
Saying, “there’s no such thing as warm gloves”
while clinging to still frames
still floating
in cigarette smog.

the benefit of the mitten
the passenger
on the South Shore
who came from Arizona
and had once gone two full circuits
on a bus route because she didn’t know
when to get off.

Unable to pull the trigger
now braving foreign weather

so she woke up early to check the schedule
and her careful Willie Nelson braids
telling everyone that she refused
to ride this train all day,
she was far from home
and didn’t want to
miss the ballgame.”

Jack started drinking on the flight home
guilt and pride,
relief and remorse
hands shaking from the warmth
when sports had lost their charm
and his lungs had lost the war