Category Archives: PublishedPoems

More Poems About Work

Work literary magazine has published three of my poems about work.
Tower Worker – West of Mt. Hood
Sex Worker in Shinjuku
Road Work

The Package

The Package was first published in print by Poetry Quarterly.

The bedspread
has animal dialogs
It shudders and sweats
spreading its fretwork
across the cordillera
The smooth places are made
into mussels and rock crabs
and the hard places are made
into deer and antelope
Leather, pine and sea salt
join with resin and marsh hawks
to make the world we see
From scuffles under the window
comes the light above the hemline
and the occupation of Paris
and Lascaux cave art and the sphinx
tongue as thick as a buffalo
Painted stick dancers
clothed in blood and teeth
and ocher and foam
brought us today, delivered
in a Fedex package:
a dish of blue eels
and ammonites
and slave songs
and mile-deep diamonds
and the lungs of kings

Storm Over Houston

Storm Over Houston was first published by Clementine Unbound.

A shadow props up the gutted barn
where we spent the night.
To be keen all the time–not to swerve,
ten minutes out of every hour,
is enough most days.

A man with boulders in his soul,
a dock trying to hold onto
it’s string of boat horses,
a bone-drenched woman
with praise for a God
who was as stealthy as a barn cat.

Out on the highway
no sound now,
as if someone
had picked them all up
from a skiff with a pruning hook
and put them in a sack.

Refugee Camp

a fence line of blue toes
clanking stomachs
night cutting words

*This poem was first published in DoveTails Literary Journal

Walking In the Rain with Robert Frost

(First published by Red River Review)

I read you first for sound,
For basalt cliffs dripping in the rain,
For lines like seasoned chunks of oak crackling
In winter’s wood stove,
For glaciers scouring down to stone
And pecker-fretted apple trees
Dropping Gravensteins with a thump
That ring your poems round.

I read you a second time for fruit,
For tragedy fermented with time and wonder.
Drawn from spider webs and rime ice
And the breath of horses and the shoes of children.
Your poems are like golden muscat grapes
Bursting with tangy juice and bitter seeds to ponder.

I read you a final time for breath.
When my own is made halting by this splintered season
And I am lost enough to pull my own ladder road in behind me.
You breathed deeply of life and drank from its deepest sorrows.
You remind me there is oxygen enough
On life’s widest sunlit prairies and in its darkest crevices.

The Wind From the Sea


The sheer window curtain bellies like a pregnant Muslim woman in her dupatta, filling with secret life from beyond the horizon.

Fine incisions written as tatters say the sea has been restless for ages. The tea kettle outside the painting purrs today will start out calm.

It is enough to know these things without having to say them. Wyeth’s painting holds them before us.

Beyond the curtain is a road leading to the sea, to whales and fishermen with sore red hands. And to you, and to me.

———————————

*Wind From the Sea was first published in the Ekphrastic Review

Cold Snap

A frozen river
of low grinding sound

plays out across
the curry brown hills,

wandering like Orpheus.
Sunlight, shade, sunlight.

———–
Cold Snap was first published by One Sentence Poems.

Hanford 1944

Hanford 1944 was published by Work Literary Magazine.

Wintering Over

(first published by the Rainbow Journal)

the Ridgefield refuge
has old oak trees

the way we
have relatives

gathered
in clans

& spending decades
not speaking

A Bag of Words

“We tortured some folks”
–Barack Obama

Like flying birds
We snapped as twigs

Covering our own heads
With a bag of words

(A Bag of Words was first published by the New Verse News)

Tell Me

(First published by Dead Snakes.)

Tell me I’m late.
Tell me the house isn’t burning down.
Tell me again how selfish I am.

Clouds carry rivers across the sky.
Marines carry their dead home. Always.
Do you carry more than a hat and gloves?

Getting Ready For Eternity

(First published by Dead Snakes.)

I see your height, I feel your weight
And watch you sew, to hew the new.
Laid in my tomb, without a comb,
This awful rouge would I gouge —
In hubris is debris.