It begins with something backward; desire 
affecting self-esteem, indulgence tempering 
rational thought. Do you remember 
the way he looked at you through the dark? 
You will feel as though you are shrinking, deliciously, 
flying back in time, your body thinning, 
milkteeth chattering back in.
You didn’t always used to be so cold. Did you 
know he has always been cold? Taller men
are more likely to have Raynauds, fingers
whitening outdoors and at night.
Some areas of the body will feel numb, 
you should know. Your perfume will
keep you awake, and you will be able
to keep moving forward.
Your memory will be foggy and it will allow you
to kiss him. You should avoid going further, for everybody’s
sake. Do you even really know him?
An individual in crisis is still just an individual.
If you do want him, then certainly he will not want you. 
Such is the way of nature,
penalizing what’s forbidden with the ebbs and flows of lust and love.
Do you remember? Beware the skipping in your chest.
You know in all likelihood you will hold him there too long.​

​“You should have stayed.” - Michael Baruch

Have you ever felt nostalgia for the future? 
A clumsy buzz in your heart
for what you think is coming. 
Like walking backwards, your heels scraping 
the asphalt in anticipation. 
Sometimes, you will stop and stare 
back. Just look at the beginning: 
age six, your thick thumbs like dull guillotines, 
prying the head off your sister’s Barbie - what 
she must have done to deserve it. What it must 
have been like to hold the headless thing 
in your hands. Do you remember the first time 
you called her Bitch? The word scratchy 
in your throat. It was April, you were nine.
It had been boiling in your stomach for weeks.

Let this be a reminder for all 
that has happened: we have been together, 
we are apart, time has passed, time, too, 
shall pass you on, gripping your body 
even when you fight back.
When you’ve grown too slow, floating 
in the present, it will be there
to push you up the steps. There: 
the door to your childhood home.
You’ll knock for too long, and maybe 
you’ll slide down to sit against it, 
falling from the doorstep of this very moment, 
clunking back down each stair: I am, I am, I am.

“A most delightsome humour, to be alone” - Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy
 
I’ll write you back, he promised, the last time I saw him,
But I can’t go on that date. The sliding glass door against my hip
Sharp and cold; the pandemic looming, knocking and knocking.
 
I’ll look forward to it, his voice catching in my ears the whole train ride,
as if sound, or touch, could cross miles and boundary lines. Yes, how
regret calls out in the morning, treading water, bright and alive.
 
I’ll take us to dinner, he said. A sideways turn, his quiet smile, gulled.
I’ll write you, I told him, stepping into the loose dress of mystery.
It was almost time for cherry blossoms, in dreamy pink, to blink awake.
 
I’ll drive you back north tomorrow, he offered, stitching the space between us
On our late walk home. My knee was bleeding from the stadium’s fence, wet.
Unburdened in intoxication, I took his hand & his offer, yes.
 
I’ll kiss you, if that’s alright? Yes, I said, yes, my hands glowing
Like splayed stars in the cold, shaking with newness, blurring
Against the dark football field. His crooked fingers spreading in my hair.​

Sleep visits like a resentful friend
Where the parachute sky
Stands bursting with a wave
Of porcelain faith.

But -- a concrete night
In gray folds of a slow sigh,
See it in red letters?
The only thing that breathes is me.
There is no reward.

They scream, "roll away the stone,"
"throw your wrench into scaffolding skies."
What station is the static on?

Featured in Gregory Orr's book "A Primer for Poets and Readers of Poetry"

I’ve been stealing words all summer --
ones in new languages to write
new places onto the backs of post cards,
exchanged for coins and flown off to Pennsylvania
where my grandmother never leaves
her room except when a post card comes,
and the pictures and words spirit her away.

No more than a paragraph on each one,
yet by now I’ve sent at least 15 paragraphs.
You would love it here.
I went to chiesa in Rome today.
Sawatdee ka from Thailand!
Nothing real, only a few words to paint full days
onto flimsy cardboard.

The real words come from the authors
whose voices wake me up each morning
on the vineyard in Potentino as I tuck the leaves
towards the sun, from the Italian men working
at my side. I write down the words I love,
the phrases I’ll use again. The ideas I’ll believe,
and share with a boy in Brazil. Mergulhar, he writes,
of the dive he’s taking with me. Into me, my stomach fluttering

with each new letter, our email chain growing longer
and longer, paragraphs stretching from my traveling laptop
to his desktop in Bagé. He has no address.
And so I share them, my favorite words, stolen
and earnest, writing a world between us,
our bodies invisible but existing,
minds whirring, fingers tapping,
tapping,
touching.

​A golden shovel poem after Sinead Morrissey
 
After learning to be lonely for no one, and
letting go of moments in which it seemed impossible to forgive,
we will be reminded of what it felt like to say us,
 
to give and take belonging, ownership of another, our
bodies tangled in the darkness beside our trespasses.
We will have let go of the power of
 
grief, let the softer things flood our minds, those things which
brought us to touched places years ago. At the end of it all, the
anger is the last thing that matters. The first
 
feeling, as it was in the beginning, as if it had never been away, is
joy: inviting and unmistakable, two bodies and the promise of love.

​If you’d looked
out the window,
at the white outcroppings
along the bluff,
 
stone castles rising
from the weeds, you’d have
seen my eyes reflected,
glowing in the glass.
 
In sleep, did you feel
the coast circling
Ireland, our green
tour bus shaking
 
with the tire-rattle
of rubber on gravel,
your cheek bobbing
on my shoulder?
 
I imagine you dreamed then
as I once did, boldly:
as the bus rocked us
up and down,
 
wishes like yellow
wildflowers trapped
between crags of limestone
at the bus’s last stop.

​I was thirteen when I first woke to blood
between my thighs and knees, the thick
drunk liquid of womanhood. I was sixteen
when a raccoon attacked the family dog
in winter, as my mom screeched & pounded
the small black & white body with a broom.
I was five when I realized I was a girl
& my brother’s body didn’t look quite
like mine, seven when I was no longer
allowed to take bubble baths because
the part of me that was smooth & closed
off to the world would open to the foam.
I was nine when Sam lost one of my blue
rainboots in the stream during a rainstorm,
after I’d lent it to her so she could cross
the water, too. I was seventeen when
my first kiss turned into my first more.
I was six when I accidentally killed a frog
& gave it a funeral in the backyard,
& my brother cried, so we dressed in black
& kneeled beside the dirt grave. 

​I don’t know for sure if the West has waves
like these, soft and dark where they meet shore,
stirred and flashed along the edges by New Jersey wind,
where children learn to not be afraid of cold, or the other
things the black salt water hides, the inscrutable
ones that find their home beneath sand and stones.
 
I can’t know if the sun sets and rises there as here, lit
every day against the pastel shutters of white shore houses.
I can’t picture the heads of lighthouses that rise above our trees,
reflected in the clear underwater of California,
or the shore flickering as it does here, the piers pushed up against it,
lights shut off by the storms that hover over coast.
 
There remains a softness still, in the seasonality, in the way our hearts shudder
when we pass through a summer too quickly, handing off our home to winter,
sideways snow mixing with white sand, pounding waves until they open.

​He will text you two days in advance,
tell you not to worry when the shoebox,
unmarked, shows up by the door.
 
He will have packed it tightly,
neatly, the oldest one at the bottom
and the one you wrote him last at the top.
 
He will want you to read them all.
You will. He will want you to hurt,
to trace with cold fingers your own words.
 
He will not know how you scatter them
on your bedroom floor--every letter
you ever wrote on its back like a dying moth.
 
He will wish he’d included your toothbrush, the Polaroids,
your underwear, the button-down you bought him
for Valentine’s dinner, and also everything else.

​The University of Virginia, October 2017
 
I want to go back to that night in Garden II,
to the hour after midnight where we sat
inches apart, on bright white bench slats,
then ran down the Lawn, staring at stars,
laughing at couples stumble-walking home.
 
Later, the worn plastic leather of lounge chairs
of the Kent dorm lounge held me close when you
were too afraid to. I did not know you—I sat
across from you and knew I wanted to. I wanted
to trace lines in the sky to count the stars, touch your hand
 
and trace lines there, too. Take me back
to that night, when I was aching but not undone,
to when paper and pen were not needed,
to when ink meant nothing, words not yet broken in me,
when your words alone were enough.

​A poem,
like a cathedral, holds secrets.
Words hover against stained glass
and slither through pews.
The priest, a poet, chooses each word
carefully, but not everyone listens.
Some hear only the silence,
words flapping like birds
against the insides of heads,
the shadowed corners of a church
long after Sunday. 

After “All Good Conductors” by Christian Wiman

Who waits inside the station for
him to tuck the dark in?
 
The quiet ones, eyes soft with hopes of sleep
against the dimmed lights,
 
the heat from the stilled engine soaking out into night sky,
warming those asleep inside, caught there til dawn,
 
those businessmen, rocked and lulled by the commute home,
woken each morning by cold cheeks on glass windows,
 
the screech of metal on metal, a station waking
against the blue mountains a few miles east,
 
the tracks lit by sunrise, a first train
churning down its aisle, shattering quiet.
 
This morning: whose beginning is made of steel veins
running through the peaks, hugging Virginia together

​how long
can you
draw out
a weary love
like the cat
dragging
yarn
in circles
around
my living
room
pulling
until
she’s too
tired
or it
runs out

At first I am so cold even the comforter is not enough,
the thick cotton settling like a gust of air across my bare stomach.
I can feel the fullness of your quiet body
 
on the other side of the bed,
the space between us drawing goosebumps,
so that when the heat returns, yes, with your hands,
 
those points of warmth on my breasts and sides,
I imagine the chilly wind pinned like lights to the ceiling,
rushing, flashing, stirring something else now.
​

The way you drew your body on mine
and looked at me like I was made of night.
 
I was reflected there,
in the stars of your eyes.
 
The way you still find
your way into every poem I write.
 
Your mouth always held my name.
You, who awakened the birds inside me.
 
If I could trace a path
back to you now,
 
I would find you in the clearing
where you first told me you loved me.
 
The night sky bright and unclouded,
the band playing music to a crowd,
 
captivating everyone but you and I.
The trees hugging us
 
from all sides, the ground,
pushing me higher.
 
I would say, Open your hand.
I would write a poem there. 

​Something about these roads,
crossing like threads pulled taut
across New Jersey—the way
they never end until you hit gold:
sand, and suddenly the roads are gone,
lost to the sea and the shells and crabs;
where one beach stretches into another beach,
and another, and so on, until you’re so far away
you can shut your eyes and imagine
that sand is what keeps the trees and roads and sea
from falling apart:
a state sewn together by more than a turnpike.

​I am not afraid that Seaside will burn again,
but that its wreckage will go unnoticed,
like the pieces of a ship that sink
to be found years and years later,
the wives of the men are also dead,
the fallen ship long forgotten.
 
When Kohr Brothers burned for the first time
in 1955, fire embracing the wooden shops
on either side, two glowing arms
rose high above the restless sea.
It was the hottest summer.
 
Two years ago the store burned again,
flames spreading from the heart of the place,
licking the shops on either side.
Timber blackened like burnt chocolate.
By the third day,
beachgoers had stopped
stopping to look.
 
Today, a piece of wood,
wet and charred,
washes ashore.
I wonder, to which wreck does it belong?