It’s disturbed light as I lay me down to my thin and threadbare mattress in order to take a nap knowing full well that objectively speaking there’s nothing wrong with my life except the vague notion that some hungry angry vicious dogs are hunting me...

By the time he was twelve, Nathaniel Harker had already lived more life than most boys twice his age, or so the men in Brownhelm liked to say. He rose before the sun, shouldered chores without complaint, and moved through the long days with the stea...

Is music reminiscent of memories or is it only music in its own right? Program music versus music music. We’re befuddled in the aisles; I’m trying to remember the last time I heard this song that’s playing. The only thing working right now is the da...

I have come back            from paradise. The flash of green was flash                     &n...

Grieving is a kind of becoming to ask oneself: what kind of person am I becoming with every phase in life. The nature itself is transformational.   Silent, I sat under the stars,  my life surging until time itself lay buried in immeasurabl...

When you hear those words ‒ “selective memory”, it’s usually cos someone’s moaning about how someone they know forgets all the stuff they did that made them look bad, only remembers when they came away looking good, the times they did something righ...

To bide your time, you rest your head against the cool glass while you desperately search for any subway rat lingering by the train tracks below. Shiny confetti and Planet Fitness Mad Hatter hats blur past you in your peripheral vision. It’s louder ...

a buzzing all over bugs under skin bugs in the               corners I see nothing but yellow   not a glow but the color of vibration of feeling —finally— ebullient &nbs...

Near the end of the fall quarter, my student mentee requests to take a selfie together. She whips out her cell phone, presses her temple against mine, angles her face, widens her eyes, and clicks. That night, she sends me two copies of our photo: th...

In this room between now and then, Before you left and I stayed, Let the atoms shiver in the void Between touch and breath, in The hesitant pause before Our lives crash into the intersection of particulate moments.   And the cat is alive.  ...

ARS POETICA (THE LAST TIME I SAW YOU ALIVE YOU SHOWED ME YOUR NEW POEMS) For Bennett   After: I sit in your backyard with the drafts you left I can’t make out, your dog running in circles barking at the sky. I join him.   I WOULD NAME A MOON CRATER...

“Memory never recaptures reality. Memory reconstructs. All reconstructions change the original…” - Frank Herbert, “Heretics of Dune” I. A city has buildings. In 2008 I moved to San Diego. I had lived all my life back East. There was a recession goin...

A Poem You Wouldn’t Know is About a Woman   On a lucky day when I am pacing around my home wondering which birds are outside my window that morning, walking from the bathroom to the kitchen, wondering also how I should spend my day, I find a lo...

In the last minute of our marriage we stood at the sink, your back to me, listening to the water and I understood, suddenly, that this was the last call—
 If I speak, the program continues, if I stay quiet, then the end— and I felt the muscle along ...

Graham always brings smoked salmon to the Saturday ocean dip at Crown Beach. We eat it like animals, grabbing fat slices off the golden paper slab with our fingers and ribboning it into our mouths. Meet me in murky water, legs slapped with stringy e...