My poems, “Missive (to the White Oak’s Depths)” and “Elegy for My Former Self,” are live in the July 2021 issue of Cathexis Northwest Press. Heartfelt thanks to editor C. M. Tollefson for selecting these pieces.
Please also enjoy the audio renditions of these poems, courtesy of—your favorite poet and mine—the one and only Robert Okaji!
My poem “Citizen Tree” has found a home amongst some luminous writing in Issue 21 of Whale Road Review. Thank you editor Katie Manning for selecting this piece!
Many thanks to editor Renée Sigel of Literati Magazine for featuring my poems, “Rewording,” “Titanoboa cerrejonensis,” and “Ghazal of the Lost,” in the publication’s Portfolio Series of previously rejected poems. Yes, a majority of my poems that make it out into the world tend to experience a healthy dose of rejection before seeing the light of day, and I greatly appreciate that Renée saw fit to bring these three stragglers in out of the cold.
While “Ghazal of the Lost” was a cooperative child, Literati Magazine found the formatting of “Rewording” and “Titanoboa cerrejonensis” to be somewhat combative, so I’ll provide the texts as they should appear below:
Rewording
_____Your laugh is the child I never knew,
a promise kept nascent like a crocus
__________beneath a winter of detritus—
_____I never knew a crocus
could reword the daylight
__________with spring’s first mist.
_____How I’d wished the earth’s iron bellows
would recast the sky’s crimson artefacts
__________my lost will had smelted into slag,
_____until living through my bitterest nights
of seismic heartbeats weathered into stalagmites
__________finally tempered my breaths alive!
_____Now, their embers light my way
to the tenderness you well in your eyes:
_____Amassed like snowdrifts
the rising moon velvets in her white hush,
__________it is the naked quiet of us
rewording the daylight
_____into ash branches
__________lustered with dusk’s winter cloak;
_____a crocus sheltered in warm mulch
__________beneath the moonlit ice;
_____your laugh,
__________the child I never knew;
_____a promise kept
__________nascent in winter’s womb.
***
Titanoboa cerrejonensis
_____When this restrictive skin
of self-pity refuses to slough off
_____& relinquish its groaning contents my pain
sends me to my prehistoric depths—
_____sliding through my black encapsulated veins
with questions of utility & necessity forking my tongue
_____into a device primed for maximal receptivity
scouring the fossil record
_____for evidence of fortitude where I find you
fifty-eight million years ago
_____at the height of your dominion
in the Cerrejón Rain Forest in what is now
an arid sweep of Northern Colombia
_____There your legacy swims its secrets
into my stagnant heart transforms my
_____mudstone back into supple blood
& re-designs me in your magnificent image
_____that I may waggle my muscled girth
_into a forty-eight-foot-long series of esses
_____effortlessly conveyed upon the swamp’s
vast network of currents slip out
_____of my twisted anthropic pelvis
& encumbering limbs & vanquish
_____gravity’s inflammatory breath
_in the clutches of my cold unshakable coils
My sonnet, “Because I Said So,” is live at The Literary Nest.
Thank you Pratibha Kelapure for selecting this piece. “Because I Said So” was first drafted during the May 2017 Tupelo Press 30/30 project. I’m grateful to Clyde Long for sponsoring and providing the title for this poem, as it was a joy to compose!
Understory
Within these riparian depths, you press
through the ditch weed & grasses that shadow
the river in greens, trying to listen
for rustles of life where dead branches lie
gathered in bands along the banks like smoke
from summer’s fire that stripped the hills to stone.
This windless spring day voices strange like stone
breathes; its bufflehead-queer, top-heavy press
across the stream’s glassy gape damps the smoke
trees’ plea for breezy reprieve in shadow—
red buds purpling with their own blooms’ weight lie
flattened to their boughs, assuaged to listen
for a far-off storm’s faint peals. You listen
for a reason to turn from your cold, stone
descent—do the unearthed cedar roots lie
about the travails of erosion? Press
them for answers, you’ll get back the shadow
of your own doubts cleaved in moss thick as smoke.
Is silence its own story, or a smoke
screen for more forbidding fables? Listen
to the garter snake slip into shadow—
when its shift through the weeds turns up a stone
that no one sees, does it make a sound? Press
your palm against a garbled trunk & lie
about the story your closed eyes see; lie
supine like tinder on a pyre until smoke
wafts from the ashes you become; or press
past the bank’s last thorny thicket & listen
for bitterns to make their water-gulped-stone
intentions known, as if your looming shadow
could spur their ardor. What is that shadow,
if not the sun’s scorn for your darkest lie?
No river embodies hope for the stone
waiting on Sisyphus to outrun smoke.
Hope is a myth the robins tell their hatchlings: Listen
at your own peril—for when the flames press
in, bearing tidings of shadow & smoke,
the first lie you listen to will make you
their stone shrine to the robins’ skyward press…
“Understory” was published in Issue 13 (Fall 2019) of Panoply. Thank you to editors Jeff Santosuosso, Ryn Holmes, and Andrea Walker for selecting this piece.
My poem “Turkey Vulture” is live in Eclectica Magazine’s January/February 2020 issue as part of the journal’s recurring Word Poem Challenge feature. I’d like to thank poetry editor Evan Martin Richards for selecting this piece, and express my appreciation for Eclectica Magazine, in general, for being one of the longest-running online journals out there, and doing such great work to promote literature and literary kind!
To think that we see them so often yet so rarely
consider how those piebald songbirds so at home
on a snow-scape in their portable parkas are made of
the exact same stuff we use to fill up our electric sky & neon
watermelon nylon winter coats which must be designed
expressly for us to go out there looking ridiculous
not to mention callous (clothed as it were in outright exploitation)—
is the thing I’m pondering as I observe through the window
a little house finch all feathery & poofed with his flushed cheeks
flitting over the snowy patio pecking among the abandoned
bench-feet for invisible if not entirely non-existent morsels
& hawking an air of self-possession that is obvious even to me
in my current incapacitated state
As for whether the red-crowned retina specialist
who conducted my examination was young &/or fetching
the prospect was murky (his brisk entrance at the climax
of my dilation coupled with his expertly-executed clasp
of my hand inspired my fleeting impression he’d been both)
& all bets were off the very moment the white-cloaked smeary
hulk of him ambushed my defenseless retinas with an impossibly
aggressive radiant device thus affording me the pivotal elucidation:
that a). the anomaly on my fundus autofluourescence images
is simply an unremarkable patch of variegated pigmentation
b). it was only natural to expect that the definition
of such a lexical wonder as variegated would elude the layperson
& c). I am indeed obliged by gratuitous pigeonholing
to take categorical offense
Not that I’m usually so bold as to co-opt medical jargon
but I’m pretty certain variegated is the only word that could
aptly account for what’s right now comprising the better part
of my visual experience as embodied by this polka-dotty
aberration also known as a scone I resorted to purchasing
in the hospital café thus affording myself the pivotal illusion:
that a). I’m quite absorbed in an earnest task
while waiting here in the lobby for my ride
& b). I wouldn’t otherwise be averting
my freakish black gaze from passersby
because c). I’m the kind of person
who always smiles at everyone as if to say
I accept you for who you are no matter what…
I’ve gathered that the dark splotches must be
cranberries—however vainly their vague sweet-tang
serves to redeem their crumbly substrate’s alleged
alimentary function
Still the finch remains staunchly committed
to my functional blindness as if by sheer force of his
impending command its concomitant scone-silage
would transcend the glass & sift to the frozen ground
“Dilated” was published by CatheXis Northwest Press in November 2018 (they seem to be having difficulties with their website). Thank you to editor C.M. Tollefson for accepting this piece!
My poem, “Understory,” is now live in issue 13 of the fantabulous online journal, Panoply Literary Zine! Thank you to editors extraordinaire, Jeff, Ryn, and Andrea, for selecting this piece. I’ve begun the absolute pleasure of delving into the fresh and evocative writing contained in this issue, and I encourage everyone to do the same. I’m honored to have my work appear among such impressive ranks.
Our favorite poet, Robert Okaji, is truly at his finest in this “luminous” collection! Order his must-read chapbook today!
The publication date for I Have a Bird to Whistle (7 Palinodes) is February 25, and Luminous Press is currently offering copies for $7.50, shipping included, to U.S. addresses, through the 24th. Unfortunately, Luminous doesn’t ship internationally, but I will take care of those orders myself.
Order link for U.S. shipping addresses.
Contact me at aBirdtoWhistle@yahoo.com for orders to be shipped outside the U.S.
“To the Dead White-Throated Sparrow” appears in my new chapbook forthcoming in March from Main Street Rag: The Death’s-Head’s Testament<<Available here for pre-order purchase for the fantastic price of $6.50/copy!
_____in my driveway:
Would you at least do me the courtesy
of an explanation?
What’s with your belly-mound-
cenotaph-arisen-from-the-stony-gloom
spiel? And why
this exquisite bundle of yours,
with its still-tender russets
folded in the unbounded repose
of a napping cherub,
as if you didn’t believe
you were still reaching for the clouds?
_____I mean,
was your plump little belly’s
sky tribute supposed to un-stone the gloom
underfoot (as if
your heavenward-splayed
finger-knobs, all ruddy-bottomed
like a napping cherub,
never knew their very purpose
was reaching for the clouds)?
The spectacle of your tiny black
lids pressed shut in sudden,
brutal resignation to croaking
_____underfoot (even
consecrated by such skyward-clasping,
ruddy-bottomed branchlessness)
hardly passes for
transubstantiation… Why package
a fully-intact cadaver’s senselessness in
the spectacle of black-faced
brutality’s sudden,
penitent resignation to permanent blindness
for stealing a glimpse
of the sun? Besides, adaptive
hydrophobia á la iridescent feather-sheath
_____hardly passes for
transubstantiation… Why package
a fully-intact cadaver’s senselessness in
this exquisite bundle of yours,
with its still-tender russets
folded in the unbounded repose
of a dead sun-god, as if iridescence
were designed expressly for
stealing a glimpse of the afterlife
in my driveway?
All right, buddy, just do me this one favor:
Spare me, would you?
“To the Dead White-Throated Sparrow” was first published in slightly different form in Underfoot Poetry. Thank you to editors Daniel Paul Marshall and Time Miller — both fabulous poets in their own right! — for selecting this piece.
