On Dreams and Poems
Strange how dreams
and poems work,
how everything mixes
together, and some of
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Katherine’s Coffeehouse
Because You Wore a Rainbow (a draft)
Because you wore a t-shirt with a rainbow on it, and because your earrings
looked like the ones I wore in college, oblong and shell and dangling
to your lovely thin shoulders, and a smile that invited me in that first
time we met, and because you talked to me about writing
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On Being The Other (a draft)
Last night I dreamt of a girl,
not just any girl, she was eleven
and had long, black, pretty hair
and an innocent pale face with a little nose
and serious lips and a chin that had not seen
as many meals as she needed and her mother
didn’t want her anymore and her father had disappeared.
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Love Song to Men
This is my love song to men.
And men who identify as men.
Not men who pose, snap pictures of you,
then drop you in gutters to drown
in waters they pour from the rooftop.
Doctrine
They called it
The Baltimore Catechism—
every doctrine has one,
but this book had a special creed
for teens: God, remind me
to obey and do what I am told,
remind me in order to be loved,
that first, I must be lovable.
Once, I Saw a Soldier
Once, there,
I saw a soldier,
leaning against a barren tree,
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Help Me Not Be Normal
Help me not be normal.
Help me when I am in formidable first grade,
counting my fingers under my desk because math is hard
and there’s too much talk from inside out and every last word
barges into my brain the way you did my bedroom
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Nightmare in Suburban America
i dreamt last night
i hid in an elevator
molding my back
into angles and steel
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What Betrayal Feels Like
I’ve decided it’s a birdcall,
not the Canada goose
I will be in the life
I live after my next, more
like the mourning dove,
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