Hiraeth

Bamboo Telegraph, published by the American Women’s Association, featured my poem Hiraeth in the July/August 2018 issue:

Hiraeth

but on a future page, I write hiraeth,
letters straddled by blank lines,
storks in a lake sky white, black feet in the danger
of events waiting to encircle the definition

a homesickness for a home
you cannot return to,
or that never was

a casual elimination of past and future, the place
where I was born but never lived,
the towns
where I lived but wasn’t from,
the undiluted person I could have become,
the safely planted future I could have raised,
the past stitched into place with swift
dips of an easy needle

I have made a home in the homesickness,
in the hiraeth – a here
with its end
smudged long by fuzzed, unfamiliar reeds
and I have sowed it in my future, where
the person I do not know yet, the person I will be
will find it
and remember that
she can never return to me

 

Salvage

Bamboo Telegraph, published by the American Women’s Association, featured my poem Salvage in the May/June 2018 issue!

Salvage

The paper moon sleeps
in a notebook
above a massacre of pen caps
and mislaid chunks of words
which weren’t evacuated with
the mouths that, spit and teeth and tongue,
allowed them to live.
Only oddities remain,
staying, swearing, staring.
Survivors that have all their syllables
are snapped up by the harassed and indifferent
and taken to some poem,
some book, some brittle literature.
And when the slips of remainders, the
afterthoughts, the words we say we want
to take back
but will actually obliterate,
squirm through the hacked silence
in the dirt,
I get on my hands and knees
and salvage.