Poems

Bad Fit  Crocuses in January. Warped frames on your stack of canvases. The Norfolk pine cracking its clay pot. Square pegs in round holes, big pills down a narrow throat, the urge to flee.  Early on, it surprised me -- your calm as you pinched your sliced finger together under the tap, tiptoeing the footstool, the house in hysterics. What doesn’t fit sticks in the memory like a key in a rusted lock, breaking off hung-over days from drugged nights, impulse from ordinary thought. Fact and theory, the mouse’s quivering mass and the improbable hole, my brittle broom a handful of straw gathering dust.

Grief It’s in the details: you standing on the other side of your snapped connection, waiting for the static to subside. It’s not as if the pain could burn you, tattoo lightning across your back, although that’s what it feels like at first. Instead, the sensation leafs out east and west, flares in the mind with curdled echoes bridging one thought to another like those pop-beads your sister used for your necklaces, their painted plastic gleam flaking off in her smudged palm. Beyond that false light, light’s memory remains; and behind that, your sister dropping all the beads rolling north and south along the floor. first published in Ithaca Lit