2024 + 2025 poems

poems from 2024 and 2025

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



01.01.25

Dear Diary:

It’s a new year and I’m already behind and never ready for the photo. Forgot a notebook and my glasses were fogged. Two days in and only seventy-five pushups down. Tipped a stool at Be Here Now where a 2007 football game was muted in the background. Irrelevant, even if current.

Tonight we shared potato chips. The outdated flavors reminded her of one night stand conversations all jumbled together in one bag. A salty chunk of unrewarding hours spent gnawing. Altered a t-shirt. Spun her hair in certain ways that drugged my sentences.

There were too many quarters lined up, so I talked with Marco and met Logan and at the end of the night spotted Missy across the table and mouthed “Happy New Year.” Her pleasant smile felt slow motion. The ringing-in voices paused. Graffiti. Paper ribbons. Two racks of eight ball. The night chill felt like space and silent cheers spilled out like gasps of panicked breath under stadium lights as the confetti fell seventeen years ago.



k

mouth cracked like canyons
trying to force the poison
of your chapstick.
leftover lips,

a stain on your coffee cup:
“k” for killer
“k” for karma
for knew your love would
push away like petals

or leaves of pages from books bought
but never came-
in the foreign language of past tense
and insipid questions
mispronounced

you waited at my house,
i waited you out.

------------------------------

gold spoons

your hair is darker now.
it’s a compliment even if it sounds more like an observation.
dusk looks good on you.
beautiful like a rain cloud drizzling droplets of life
on thirsty swatches of land,
fortunate enough to catch your downfall.

and you fell somewhere between main and eighteen
sideways down the stairs
into hot chocolate cups at coffee bars
three year constant cascade
against the hand that shields the head from
the lightning to the heart
in the cold of your shade.

---------------------------

intellectually stimulating

you once told me that life
is a battle on several fronts
aggressively mediocre and
your brother is gone

just a small frame broken at the binding.
you say you’ll never be a muse to someone.
because you’re too much and can never
wait for your coffee to cool
and it’s literal
and it’s arbitrary like your therapist
would say and it’s the way you’ll
worry until you have frozen feet

and every time i see you sip from the
civil war mug keeping
you warm as the coffee cools:
the pages clutter like

your cupboard of stolen cups
lovingly lifted from the people you love
with the courage of someone who can karaoke
while doubting their ability to sing
or someone who cries in the morning at the beauty
of the sun and gets sad at night
because the rays woke you up

from a good dream
on a day too cold for a walk

recovering in tears to the beauty of life
no matter how long the darkness lasted
and you say you’re interesting,
not inspiring

you just left
it’s silent in my house
but i still hear music

amusing.

---------------------------

people & places 1873-2000

who do you look for while everyone is looking at you? are they pinned to the bar beams, posed in dangling polaroids? do you lean over the railing to watch them dance below? with the moon a mile ahead and the sunset shrinking in the rearview mirror, asleep in the passenger seat sipping the caffeine of the radio.

i ordered a coffee for the smell, and waited for the notes to pull you into frame. one closed off by ropes. a masterpiece. the sugar that calms my coffee down. the sweet that grounds me.

an empty clothing rack rattles down the hall. echoes of pen clicks, clicking crescendo footsteps on marble stairs. will you climb them two at a time? i set my jacket down and planned a cool way to pick it up again. maybe “the fool” is the most honest version. someone who tried to taste life and instead swallowed a stomach full of gum and ink, dark like your hair.


---------------------------

a new pack of pens

a black ink language that we all use to comprehend. before the screens. before we all embraced the weight of the world and hefted it onto our shoulders like the march to surgery rooms. no one can see me making a fool of myself if i never let them in. if i stay scribbled on lined pages. dogeared. beleaguered. stuck in spiral bound havens. singing of grief that will last a lifetime as long as i save the checkpoints (a tote of ticket stubs, photographs, letters written before our shared dementia). songs everyone else lost. whether clouds or specters swirl across the bluelight bubble we live in: i can still see out.

---------------------------

chronological t-shirts

who was that in the snapshots
spread out like clouds on the carpet
or stars in the sky
the water droplet stains
in a sink we all sank into

it takes all of the hands and
the wisdom my grandparents always had
to recall whatever the kids were smiling about
and still pinpoint every bend in every
river where every photographed fish was wrested
from the waters

an avalanche of revisions drift over the pages
but you still stop the flood
and you remember
and the clothes aren’t vintage
and you remind us to turn off the projector light
before it's our time to sleep.


---------------------------

The Infamous Tale of Black Bessie Robinson

Everyone knew her, but no one wanted to admit it. Saw her coming only through peripheral vision. A madam casting her magic spell: the irresistible whores of the Blue Front Hotel.

Montpelier. 1895. Once a bustling oil town notoriously known throughout the other bustling oil towns as a cesspool for drunkenness and violence. Knife fights on dirt streets. Brawling young men wasting their weekly wages on whiskey. If you were to request a “ticket to hell” every agent would nod, knowingly stamping the slip.

Transient inhabitants in and out like the swing of saloon doors. Conquest complete. The prettiest in the state. Drawing up suspenders, scratching their names deep into the headboards and ducking down the narrow step stairs on their way to some crosstown boarding house. And memories of this newborn municipality became covert whispers slowly drowned out by the rhythmic rumbling of the wells.

The folklore faded like answered prayers. Beneath the chime of church bells, the movers and shakers of the city stumbled from storefronts. Sun drunk. Lowering their gaze to make out the Sunday best of the girls on parade while worried mothers pulled their children into soda shops.

The old people who heard the stories from the old people before them are gone. And to the police, the ones who checked to see if she was holed up in her hovel by the tracks, Black Bess was a spectre- skipping town. No fingerprints on file, no known photographs and the single painted portrait was never found.

Local youth of the 1960’s broke in through busted windows to gawk at the names chiseled in the crumbling plaster. They knew what it meant. Who they were. What they saw. What they did. They scaled the trodden stairs, padded against the wood grains, and exited with a familiar style of stealth and secrecy. Echoes that vanished quicker than the men who came before them.

Everyone thinks about her, but no one will admit it. A life found only in memoriam and the faint foundation footprint encircling the lot. Forever remembered and eternally lost.

---------------------------

Ophthalmology

my grandpa’s laughter once lifted to the birds resting in the oaks.
stirring them to flight as grandma raced
away from loose roosters.
a pair of young smiles that still thaw the family.

picture me with the pictures someday on a porch swing:
sky pacing against dangling feet,
tying on cigar band wedding rings
greyed and frail
steadily feeding myself the times

when my brother worried about lunch meat conspiracies
his wife tucking a spoonful
of elderberry syrup between his lips.
between sips of diet mountain dew
before he could mouth i love you, too

olivia, eight, told us her biggest fear was crossing the street
as she covered our faces to recall
the radiant galaxies collected in our eyes
and behind our palms we prayed:
that she would forever be shielded from
any greater dismay.

baby j won’t remember any of it.
not the slow jazz of his grandmother’s
fingers rolling marbles
or the way myla climbed the animals to
switch the lights

back to the years of stealth padding past open rooms
on our way to coffee cups sinking into
their tabletop rings, spirographing history
shuffling conversation starter cards
rocking the kids of our kids to sleep
like vessels at sea

i’m adrift these days, but can sit still in that house
where every creaking floorboard is a
known groaning, dead giveaway:
a legacy language spiraling through
loosened screws.
wooden planks imprinted with each
compression

“what would you change if you could?”
and we all ignored the question.

---------------------------

blueprints to rebuild

i was not drunk when i burned down my home.
ran in like a coward
to lie on charred wood floors
while you packed, hovered south
a ghost exiting
the embers

slipped into the fog and chill of the couch.
kept that cold
in a clenched jaw for years.
a dead gaze fixated on the flame.
how can two haunts be cut off
in this day and age?

tripped through rubble to
crawl inside a clawfoot tub
coughing out words that should
have been said before the framework fell down
and tested myself to see if
i could never come up.

from white cast iron to
stoneware cups of karma
pouring over the blueprints to rebuild

once walled in by your wallpaper
now peeling past burnt
layers to find a way back.

---------------------------

poem i wrote in winter

in chicago,
we shot darts with our off-hands.
isaac, lefty, victoriously said
“i am officially right handed now.”

that night we sat up
laughing at three-minute stories
about despair.
a stakeout to catch the rats
on sidewalks below as
the steam from tea
rose to violin strings.
he kissed her cheek and asked,
“what do you think about that?”

spent a day on the trains with her
where we ignored the serenade of
sirens, screeching rails and the rumbling
lumbering metal cars flowing
into the city.

every poem about this place has
already been written, but i need
something to keep my hands busy.

eyes closed on the train car home
with tracks cutting into the
electric rails of my veins
and my feet falling asleep.
i’ll read a letter to milena
and reminisce about how someone
else once felt.

---------------------------

kiss me, make it better

it was just three years ago i learned anxiety was real
so it makes sense that this morning i had to
Google delirium.

“what causes this?”
“where do i experience avoid it?”

top result: the hospital
this is where you apparently fall into
the “5 P’s of delirium."
pain, pee, poo, pills and pus.

nursed, cherished harbored the pain and finally
opted for the pills and
a sense of altered awareness.
an out patient to fix the stress hernia
you lovingly planted in me

a noun defining either a disturbed state of mind
or wild excitement.
delirious —
an adjective defining us.

but, we shared it i suppose.
a drugged-up drink with two straws

you sipped agitation and
slipped into hallucinations.
quickened heartbeats in a city slowed down.

you were born into it.
at the end of the hostile hallway
in a trailer home. i moved in mentally
and if three years had turned into six —

now, here i sit with
pictures and ptsd headaches,
still nervous about every red car
missing you from a distance.
i write about the daze felt years ago
to recover equilibrium.

---------------------------

a walk around pretty lake with olivia

we sought shade in the slender
shadows of telephone poles
and the dark awning of branches
peaking out over the asphalt.

gathered a photo of every lawn gnome,
every lake relic, every home clinging to its
wood frame, chipping paint
flaking in the sun.

the warmth of joy in your constant conversation:
how long until our next birthdays,
the songs stuck in your head,
the way life looked when i was young,
bleating goats, trailer park fountain.

our hand in hand pace that
radar speed signs could not calibrate (calculate)
carried by tired feet that will still race
the rest of the way home.

at eight years old you realized
it takes your legs twice as many
strides to trek the same distance as mine
and yet, with splashing kicks and stroking arms
you would have swam the entire
diameter of the lake if it wasn’t for
the fear of losing your Croc charms.

---------------------------

puerto rico mission trip

we filled the Mccammon cargo van at 3:00 a.m.
hand-crank windows and all or nothing air condition.
when made beds made sense,
maybe that’s when we were
wrested from wonderland

and became the driver
of former classmates turned adults, turned
parents of kids who are exactly who i remember
being yesterday. sliding down stair railings.
rolling eyes at the nuns who bragged
about the healing blood.

our plane forced screens in front of every face,
center mounted on the back of every seat.
slept through the tutorial on where
flotation rafts were stored
but at least we can watch Paddington in Peru.

a plugged in parent,
plucked the complimentary
blue earbud from his left ear and leaned
across the aisle to tell me about Defender Ball.
“what did you do for the four hour flight:
watched a pill bounce around like it’s 1985.”

pong was his favorite, but before my time
we had Driver: keyboard maneuvering
a white brick through narrow lines
blinking against a black backdrop
chalk-like, stubby rectangle cig
Slusher breathing coffee breath
from behind the rolling cockpit

cigarettes were once sold (and smoked) on airplanes.
30,000 feet above the smog of cities, an encapsulated
tube of blackened lungs and popping ears

roadtrip supplies:
backseat bingo,
spiral graphs and view masters.
watching the world on finger-flipped slides
as the world flew by
like closing the shade midair so that there’s
no glare on the animated flight path staring me down
from 12 inches away.

12 years old, head down in the backseat
guiding crayons and colored pencils
between the blackened silhouette outlines
of dinosaurs and disney characters.
anticipating the potholes that might prevent
the tramp art from eventually adorning the refrigerator.

now, are the passengers impressed
with my “cool, but careful because it’s the middle of the night and i slept
only one hour before deciding to pack”
steering wheel hand placement. i have already missed
two turns, so i doubt it. tacked on ten
minutes that seemed irrelevant
when you’re awake in a sleeping world.

when we arrived at the airport all i hoped was that
they took note of how i stayed between the lines.

---------------------------

amatory nothing
(“amatory” : intended to stir up romantic feelings)
not sex, but the charge around it; the filament between body, mind, symbol

the people were checking their watches beneath the buzz of neon bar lights. glowing aphorists calling rawbone frames away from the crowds. borrowing breath from the wind. leaning against the warm bricks of the building while she soaked into him.

it was just a smile, really. but it’s all he sees now. it’s the sky. the jazz in the blue notes.
a poem in brushstrokes blending paint across caramel canvas. blurred and burning, and settled and dried. he knew his fingers would never smear it.

but she came over with hands covering a constellation of thirty two stars speaking to the universe. spoke in code. spoke with squinted eyes and a mouth curled at the corners. twirling a necklace between nervous fingers in the middle of hover fly summer.

he went home and she went home. every wifi wire could connect them. he would have hitchhiked, too. a hobo life wasted like the static of landline numbers memorized for years but unable to create conversation. so they never ring.

boxed in by calendar squares. green tea in hand, soothing smells of jasmine. suspended bulbs hovering over half-finished mugs encircled by friends growing up together under a moon made red by canadian fire in a royal 4 4 0 attempt to elucidate the dream

“sent last week” but the sky still visits in his sleep. tossing and turning over the constellations. she’s the atmospheric whirl of the bedside fan, the cool turned cold. him: the weeks old playbill pinned to the street post.

and so he grabbed an extra blanket from the closet to cover up from the cold of outer space and blackout the pinholes grouping together into recognizable patterns. speaking of, in the morning he needs a drawer for the calendar. do not send.

this is not prosaic. grab coat. meet friends. performance at 7:30. cash only.

and then she sings. amatory. nothing.

---------------------------

handkerchief

there used to be these quiet rituals that all men took part in.
a solemn rite as simple as a handkerchief in a back pocket:
to collect the sweat from a hard day’s work,
or disappear the tears from children
after scraped knees
and passed away pets.

their wrinkled hands shook them free
as new creases were cut into the cotton-
at funerals that felt like countdowns.
during each wedding ceremony,
absorbed in the moment.
they had not turned the tv on
this century.

in the opposing patch pocket of the jeans
a leather wallet,
held together with rubber bands
stress split, cracked at the seams
brimming with business cards
and sunfaded photographs
of the children, the dead pets

when the sun sinks into the sky
like the ink on funny papers
settling into the arms of recliners
after a nightly drag, heirloom lighter
fingers fumbling for a tiny case of hearing aids
a loss of identity like handing over the car keys.

before bed ceremonially
checking their footing before
stepping from the bath.
protecting a mind full of knowledge
on outdated technology
that we will all fall
back on when the grid goes down.

and the old men all say that it will.
because collapse is cyclical.
almost ritual.