PROSE

[click on the images to navigate to each piece]

POETRY

I travel to bathe in healing waters

On a train between Colorado and Utah, 2024

Double crescents across my heart
The moving-pain, tearing-brightness.
Insides bruised. Gentle, ripened in transit
Easily mistaken for steel. Salt-bitten, teeth marks
and saliva stains the mountains bleeding. 
Runoff of chrome and acid clear
Endured but stinging. That brightness again 
and a shuddering, on ancient track. 
Each jostle: a granule of ancestral blood
Remembers red-tailed sunset. 
Stars sung into place over each stone monument,
layer upon layer uncovered like casting wax, carved 
by tectonic knife, 
which has pierced the oily stomach. The great stink 
of sealed-up systems is leveraged and cordoned off. 
Pitched neatly: it’s good for bathing in. 
Mineral miasma shall render us decent. 

Beautiful, ungraceful bodies doing what humans do–
remembering the primordial seas. Ships pass in the steam. 

Melodic call from deck in dolphin cadence! 
A narrow range, but the signal is clear
and I pick it up on the spokes of a
Catherine wheel of desire, impaling my
beautiful ungraceful body. Please! do not illuminate
me any more than necessary.

I dream the limerence of small town lights
underneath desert’s goliath night:
Hadal distance, in our headlights’ 
transient, bioluminescent eye.

Soul thesis

Utah, 2024

I am hungry for the world and would take its lands
and waters into my mouth before manflesh. My love is for something
larger, longer-remembered, low and ancient as thunder.
Embossed upon its surface: the question I have no language 
to speak, or read, and I must avert my eyes from its
brightness lest they lead me leaping blindly before I’m ready. I'm saying
My eyes drink
before my mouth is ready.
This brief blink of life and the gift of self-awareness
must be so I can find a way to write this great longing.
It must be the opportunity for this soul
to admit this longing.

dark trout/in cold/night river

Colorado & Goshen, MA 2024

Flip a sand dollar
on the back of each finger. Let it click against
the only clear part of you that God left 
unsheathed. 
There’s love on one side, loss on the other–
of course, this is what lives 
at the bottom of the sea, and it’s what 
you pay upon arrival. 

The pressure down there crushes my chest to nothing. I see
angels who are made of mostly water, with soft glowing bodies,
runway lights beckoning.
Coral castles take no notice
of decades. Neither do their neighbors and
soft residents. Out of sight of day
You must measure the years in decay
and what grows out of it.

Cut stone. 
Crack it or knap it; the shape resembles coherence
which allows us this discovery:
this is what those time-strung friends left behind
in caves
in dreams. 
In stuff which bridges the unslakeable distance:
Then, now. Here, now. 
The quiet job of walking towards on the 
beautiful path. Carved in, hard-won, holding the hands of our mothers, whose
quilt needles stitch skins to stretch 
about home bones. Stubborn roots in dust and river
then, there, here, now, the quiet job of
driving forwards on the beautiful track.

Rootless, in transit, the train hums
north-west bound with 
susurrant passengers
track burned-in under mountain.
Spectral and seeking 
the limits of canyon walls
dark trout 
in cold 
night river.

Winter Solstice Destination Wedding!

Glenwood Springs, Colorado & Salt Lake City, Utah, 2024

Twice baked croissant in tender mouth, fruits of patience rewarded
Velvet delicate, green needle celebrant, thinness disregarded.
Flesh of beasts in earthen pot 
and wooden spinner stopped.
Bite of pine and glasslike chime
Folded flour,
Salted rime. 
Candied orange strung up high
perfuming home with citrus sigh. 
Week of candles' miracle blue:
Antimony's smudge foreboding sooth.
Pegs click, cat tongue lick, road-slick negotiation
At midnight station by 
dreamlike gear and tooth.
Black card guard lined up to honor 
wedding night's interlude.
Bodies light, altitude mineral sonder,
heated lovely langour
alongside canyon river’s wander.
Stormcloud, homecome, creaking lightning 
Tradition scraped off 
attachment-style fighting.
Brisket, biscuit, Die Hard diskette 
Everybody's favorite seasonal bullshit.
Cat whiskers woven in unsteady wicker,
Valley byway floated by way of
coracle of love.

A glowing pink egg

Amherst, 2017

i love you, and i choke.
the words burn inchoate inside my chest.
sometimes i see the feeling inside of me lift out through my mouth
in a glowing pink egg
and the feeling leaves my legs and rushes into my fingers and
i can’t help but shake with it, shake with it, shake with
the light from the elliptical sphere of my soul dancing on the walls
across the ceiling.
i shake with it, i shake with it

i lose the feeling like a levee breaking behind my eyes.
my hair is static under my fingers and i rest
my forehead against the nearest cool surface.
i rest my forehead against your shoulder
curled in on myself, heart-protective, fetal position,
trying to contain the energy and knowing
that osmosis occurs with every brief contact.

Blue-eyed Nebraska

On US-18 near Swett, South Dakota, October 2022

Bronze-dust byways arc
the breast of the earth,
which sweats in a golden October rain. The sun tries to upstage.

Grid fields undulate and fly 
underneath her. The humming superengine throbs.
The horsemuscle twitch of her v6 paints a thready line from Illinois,
and I must wonder for how long the land has looked like this. 
In my camera lens, in my rearview. In my sunglass frames. 
Pulling over in a dustcloud, I tie up my horse.
I lay upon the road. 

I set my head down carefully, precisely, in the middle of the tiny gap between yellow lines. Gravel
digs into my scalp beneath my cobweb hair, quilt-square skin.
What's mended will always give, under direct pressure. The blue bowl is placed
over my eyes. 
I close them to better hear the field congregation’s
wordless, breathless, tidal shush. Wind's feathers brush the bridge of my nose. 
The wavering sun does not know whether to charge or retreat–I listen, strain my ears,
but there is no 
trumpet to command her legions forth. 

I can lay here for hours without seeing another. Briefly entertaining the dream of
broken-bottle pour of blood,
grey brain,
my crushed blue eye
ground unrecognizable into the asphalt. If my body became particles
shaken across the earth, would this place so far from the sea recognize me? 
Even vultures would cough up the taste of Atlantic brine.

The road-carried roar of other riders shakes these thoughts out of me.
They settle like so many raindrops, beading perfectly intact upon the ground,
trembling, jellylike;
one million blue-irised eyes. I collect my head. 
Push myself from the ground. Swing a leg over and 
I’ll never ride this road again.

Judas in a painting by Wyeth

Connecticut, 2015

Judas lies immortalized
reaching for home over a dead field–
undeserving even of suffering, for
what was there left to do but forgive? and
allow for reflection. possibly repension–

The supernova heat of heaven’s doors is poorly matched by Yehuda’s small wood stove.
He sits alone mostly; unsurety now lives in his hands.

Gavri’el visits every so often.
Gavri’el smells always of milk and honey and iron, the sweetness of a storm.
The fell consonants of Yehuda’s name
ring through his head when it speaks,
disturbing the dead grass.

Shimon (Peter, they now call him; Yehuda dislikes the sharpness of it)
visits too.
Yehuda wonders why, and does not know whether it is out of sympathy
perhaps nostalgia?
or by way of the bitter road of guilt.
They
sit on the edge of a black ocean
and gaze out at the portal of heaven far above as their tiny, mortal words drift
across the star-freckled waves. They speak of mundane things.
So it would seem.
So it would seem.

Yehuda finds a reflection of himself shimmering and frozen
in Shimon’s gentle eyes. Like fish scales
their memories drift through patches of silence, sunlight.

Poem for Kat Sirico

Becket, Massachusetts, 2025

The text of this poem was found on page 7-13 Section 5.0 “Incident Reporting” in the Handbook of Oceanographic Winch, Wire and Cable Technology, 3rd edition, edited by John F. Bash

Although no one likes to consider
all the things that can go wrong, it is important
that when they do occur
they be fully
and accurately
reported.

The minimization of a problem
or a catastrophic failure
by either refusing to face the problem
or by simple acceptance of such a failure
as a natural occurrence
does
nothing
to eliminate the initial causes of the problem.

By minimizing a problem
all that is accomplished is the 
recreation
of the same set of conditions
that led to the problem
or failure
in the first place
and the probability of another death
in the future
is more or less assured.

I live inside a dark house

Charlton, Massachusetts, 2025

I live inside a dark house
but sometimes click the old yellow fluorescent
ON above the sink. Fruit flies, ghosts.
Dog food, stovetop, dark wood, carved in relief.
Golden hour
ends outside.

After I leave,
the house watches the sun set
and sings its whistle-clang
radiator song to itself.

Unseen,
sunlight will fill this house
beaming through the window
they used to pass the coffins through;
plaster walls being an excellent insulator
both at night and in mourning.

The golden light of memory
illuminates my dark house.
I knock on my grandmother’s door
and then let myself in through the garden.
Her house is shining brightly inside.

We drive her childhood streets
I hold her hand as I hear her
become a little girl again
describing all the rooms of the house
all the houses on the road.

We are both surrounded by antiques,
her and I.
I put my feet up on the sea-trunk coffee table next to books marked with
century-old letters, postcards.
Great-grandfather’s clock
regards me from the corner. The cabinets he built for my great-grandmother have been
judiciously rearranged.

The old painted harbor scene
keeps me company, with its horse-drawn trolley and sailboat. A sunny day.
Couchside crouches the ancient chess table
inlaid with salt, stars, cracked compass rose.

I imagine its many players:
Ghosts at either end, clicking, whistling their
pieces across the board,
playing until
night falls
inside of
a dark house.