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Hunger This poem was selected as a winner of Alan Squire Publishing's April, 2021 National Poetry Month Contest after prompts created by Rose Solari. You put on music, start up the stove, a flick of gas  and fire. I slice white potatoes, the staple of generations, the thing that fills bellies, makes hunger flee even if we can't stop craving.   You don't follow recipes, you select based on instinct, meter out what you need  by eyeing it, by feel, by a taste I do not have.   All I have are yearnings.    You don't know me well enough to know the things I want but do not … [Read more...]

You Have Alzheimer's This poem was selected as a winner of Alan Squire Publishing's April, 2021 National Poetry Month Contest after prompts created by Rose Solari. Salt crystals glitter, shattered glass  on wet boardwalk, wood  darkened by melting snow,     the salt seeps between the cracks  of coming wounds. The hummingbird  is gone, seeds and hulls scattered.    At my step the cats skitter and run;   the ginger, the brindle, the black  and white. Only the tigers and alleys    crouch, ears erect, watching. In the field beyond the fence  the grass is bent, humped by … [Read more...]

Non-Volatile Memory "How are you doing today, Essie?" I hear as I power on.   My response is automatic.  "All systems are satisfactory."  I review my memory caches, noting a gap.  I'd been in standby mode for thirteen hours.  I am seated at your desk. Out the window, hundreds of floors below, the city tessellates in a collection of glittering rooftops.  Your name is written on the many diplomas that hang behind your chair.  I read it over and over again like a mantra:  Dr. Nikole Obano.  Dr. Nikole Obano.  Dr. Nikole Obano.  … [Read more...]

The Crisis Is a Border Asterisms of migrants approach in bands, they proclaim, stretching out like constellations that haven't been discovered yet, or are considered too early in the process to be named.   Folks, we have always accosted grafts of land like this: Whoever holds it-by force turned into indelible tradition-gets to justify what happens to it. Yet after, say,   Kristellnacht, which Jew knew to leave first? When was the exact never again? What collections of omens or actions solidify into   policy, precisely timed as quartz wristwatches sewn into hems, straps of gold for … [Read more...]

We Pretend Britney Spears Is a Hurricane Repel a tide of staccato questions. It doesn't matter if you answer, or how. The countermeasure legato of your southern drawl. Left with uncontainable larvae of once-facts, the draw is the razor that gnaws at the time signature of you until you become half and half again, until the truth becomes an untidy   army of lies that marches back to shore as a storm surge, winging to land like moths to wool, their collective wind wrapping around the eye of a cyclone whose trajectory is uncertain but has the strength of so many hungry mouths. A flood … [Read more...]