Poetry
A collection of original poems.
Porschegasbord
In Search Of Dreams
At the Cardiologist’s
Mystifying Answers to Magic 8 Ball Questions Regarding Recent Political Events
Bad Angel's Home
Solaria
An Alternate Ending
Gilgandra, 1963
Words Unheard
Summer in the Mountains
Haberdasher
Mother-in-Law
Stealing Baby Jesus
The headline in today’s Inquirer shocked me to my very soul: “Baby Jesus Stolen from the Shrine of St. John Neumann,” Northern Liberties neighborhood, Fifth Street & Girard. In broad daylight, too. Okay, it was only a plaster figurine, not expensive, though very much beloved— according to the shrine’
Ice Skating on Lake Estancia
Shahuhude (Foolish)
The Teacher Retires
The Sound of Silence
Like a Rock
Cheers
"God could be shaking a cocktail for me and I’d still/have a complaint."
At Woodlawn
Three Haiku
The curved universe reflected in this puddle Let us break our stride
The Discarded
Villanelle for Stronghold Table and Daydream
“Prairie dogs call through the murmuring grass,/mimicking history—its rhythmic drum beats—/and resurrecting Wodziwob’s sacred chants.”
Indigo Goodbyes
“in a vale of blue orchid gowns/sewn with bachelor buttons/in lavender blue fields”
The Ficus Frost
“to the garage bound welders masked/in metal, tampering the eternal flame”
Melodic Dream of Attic
“Little dragonfly,/Gliding, flew.”
A Chapel
“Yet these walls sound with echoes of the past,/With whispered prayers which linger in the air/And animate this space – still holding fast:/A shelter from the passing world’s despair.”
The Incorporated Town and Cold War Clocks
“The train cars are trying to sleep/in the postal town. Purple tracks/forsake concrete footer and loading/dock pad. The pale moon/asks homes to hold the bones.”
Public Education
“No one assigns homework./No one expects anyone to do anything./Disappoint, like ill-fitting pants,/can chafe you to death.”
Daisy Chain
“Astrology is not a science because women conceived it/and it’s not a religion because the stars, even/with the pictures they pattern,/could never take the place of a god”
Overpass to Memphis
“This insufficient code of the soil—/aphasia’s shorthand where/language lathers in mud, masquerades its atoms”
The Bells, on Evening Paths
“The tower tall strikes bells. The day slinks out/Leaving behind skies watercolor clear/And gives the evening air the taste of song”
Perfect Paradox
“the idiosyncrasies, stamps of my proprietorship”
The Worst of Our Fathers
“we struck/each other so often, too often,/like astronauts/scraping for the last flight/back to earth”
My Best Friend’s Sugar Daddy
“waxen winter plants, an oil portrait of a stillborn son,/sensory deprivation tank”
Miscalculated
“For this, we built a star-searcher/and launched it/into the galaxies:/Mirror upon giant mirror/sifting through time”
Observance, 2022
“Someone recently fell/into an industrial mixer at the latter’s factory./The company sent bread/from the same facility to her funeral.”
Saints
“What kind of light flames on them? What’s on fire—/A church? A shop? But also inward: desire”
Night Stalkers
I Thought I’d Live ‘til Ninety-five
“I envisioned myself old on a mountain hike/a soft breeze lifting my long white hair/I thought I’d live ‘til ninety-five”
Asterisk*
“Sinister pinwheel/stuck to a breezeless sentence/as sly ornament—”
The Wake
“I swore I heard willows cry/through the zig zagged fields,/traveling through my universe/as quickly as the moon touches our light”
Moth
“The city never sleeps: the isle of faces illuminated by cell phones/is proof its waking isn’t rising, only beeping, only static,/only the cashier in the convenience store, only flickering.”
Nostalgia
the gilded tree that glitters in dusklight/like an upside-down chandelier
Witness. Target = Rubble
“We thought there couldn’t be anything more./But hurricanes can collide with tornados, can join floods./Beautiful and horrific are the moment’s songs.”
Bruises Bloom Roses
“Bruises bloom roses; the blind bird has fled./Ocean quiet bedroom night light turned dim,/the sting of his fist purple on her skin.”
A Woodpecker Pecks
“the specific iteration of woodpecker pecking at yet/another juicy place, but I forgot to pack the guidebook”
Villa 351
“The news we got at first was dire,/the damage bad though not entire”
Hands Together Ghazal
“Seek mercy for eggs we scrambled in a youth/spent banging pots and pans together./For the telling of clumsy lies, our voices/cracking like pecans together.”
The Treachery of Poetry
“How/it both is, and is not/a type of existence.”
Bruegel, Columbidae, and Walking Home
Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Battle Between Carnival and Lent (1559) I imagine them in mud, steaming people, bony hands joined to the land, farming with fingers clawing furrows in the earth, dreaming of rain. Someone begat someone who begat someone, who begat someone else (etc) then you and I
Moon Bloom and Lithopedion
“Night flower,/short-lived lover/of darkness,/offspring of cactus,/desert jewel/lulled awake/by moonbeams”
Down at the Ecoplex
“Doom is there staring, everywhere/I go, like a brazen coyote/dead center of the road/half-starved so it doesn’t care anymore.”
The Hand
“The hand drops a fresh globe/into the scoured skull, secures breath upon/the hemispheric nostrils and stands back,/appraising…”
Mannequin Exposé
“Among a murder of mannequins/the guilty can’t be picked out of a lineup.”
Skwentna, AK
“The woods sigh. And then, a thousand miles away,/I’m in your arms again. Your breathing is an ocean./I’m drifting away. You whisper.”
For Your Penance
“There is a fervor that I do not surge with,/A saintliness with which I do not sing.”
Butter Weed
“Having just emerged from her tv and ac,/she was too sun-shocked and asphyxiating/to hear ‘it’s a lovely shoot’/as my spade severed the root.”
Fire Island
“I scatter the sandpipers who/run from me/but not/the tides.”
Shadow
“her body, between the buildings/behind her and the parked cars/in front, throwing a coal-black shadow/on the ground the color/of tarnished silver…”
Ben Jonson’s Prison Conversion
“You had time to contemplate its masonry/and recall that other jail, the temple/of muscle and flesh built by your trade/of bricklayer, now turning wan and idle.”
Following Bishop, This Excess Our Sentience, and Amnesia Palace
“The far shore wore a gauzy veil of rain./Dark thunderheads rose over Evian/and shook the silver surface of the lake,/ruffling like shot silk.”
The Disappearing Sonnet
“Cicadas, dirty oil, dogs, Venus, gloves/clouds, manholes, fled storms, black notes, harmonies/float indiscriminate as my head throbs/then disappear on the next wisp of breeze”
The Lecher’s Lament
My Red Schwinn and Bird Shot
“While others cycled to dusty fields,/sported bats and mitts, shouted to claim/their favorite positions, I was alone,/my red Schwinn and me—no/deception of ritual, no useless chatter,/no bad calls, no vicarious parents.”
Hair Clip
A poem by Nancy Byrne Ianucci.
The Orthodox Church of Ukraine Reschedules Christmas and Judges 9:45
“After supper,/God burps through his heartburn, eyes Gabriel/and—as expected—punishes: Two thousand years/hard labor for your antics, errand boy.”
Hair Clip and Dread Talk
“and I send her sunflowers on a sunny day./and I think of her children./and I sing with the Wailers.”
Gods and Angels and Other Poems
“The Sistine Chapel hived billions/of microbes, moss piglets/throbbing on God’s finger, frescoes flooded/with bacteria, angels fruiting cocci.”
Étude: Perspective Photo Lyric
Beyond a life of seeing, saying, being, by sparest nudge or shimmer, I shall cease. I ask what for, the dying, what the living. I start recording. I collect and keep.
Old Men Coughing
“Coughing, ululating, barking, whooping./Can he cough out the memory of a lonely/girl waiting, wanting, watching, waiting?”
Quan Yin
“Wife of himself/she taught him how to be in this world/as all women teach. The woman in you/will teach you, man king,/how to be.”
Shifting Patterns and The Rose
“Ever human-centric/We self-aggrandized/Anthropomorphized/And now agonize.”
Paying For Pleasure
“The old man had paid dearly/he could still get lost in dreams”
Homelands
“The bright green of summer wheat/with the brown of the ducks that stalk the fair/dykes where the raft spiders search for things to eat.”
Villanelle on a Theme from Rimbaud and Other Poems
“He feels himself watched/as he counts accents./He knows the painter’s/watching for the precise moment/when his blue ink freezes.”
Arteries & Veins
“In oncoming lights, my veins are dirty strings.”
After Emily Dickinson, “Circumference thou Bride of Awe”
“Every night/A lover be”
Midnight Sutra
“In yellow night, the day refuses to give ground/and I prepare to wait out its siege. Soon you’ll/arrive, and together we’ll chant the Midnight/Sutra”
Salamander
“Held in palm,/a bloom of peony to/inspect.”
You Hesitate, You Die
“A metaphysical compass, a refrain, an unyielding ethos in which to believe,/no longer reserved for near misses with the vehicular minions of the MTA,/I have come to regard existence as nothing more/than this pull between hesitation and action”
Duncan Farm
“to my dog/Nate/as he is finishing/a seizure/i repeat/i am with you”
Cicada Season
“Wire/protects the beech/from bladed lovers/initial-besotted for years,/each letter a small death.”
AquaDom
“Soon first responders make a grim/assessment of the odd catastrophe.”
Three Poems by Jonathan Ukah
“Then you arrived like fresh tulips in winter,/the shape of my heart, the color of gold;/you turned the weeds in my garden into roses,/every rock on my farm was a bar of chocolate/waiting to feed our future generations…”
Three Poems by Ace Boggess
“I scan rooms with a happiness detector,/which is like a broken Geiger counter/that stays silent while the bombs go off.”
Off-Road
“Age isn’t just a number, as we’d heard/it’s how we get here. I’m twice my daughter’s age/and neither thought we’d haul ourselves this far.”
The Elegant Trogon and Poem for Robert Desnos
“I have/a secret pigeon in my heart./I keep it in a cage composed of object lessons and feed it/moral law.”
Lost in the Woods
“Lost in the Woods is a symptom/of heart’s sudden loss/of direction registered in small/persistent cramps and little gasps.”
That Wind
“Night’s ink congeals on rice, coating peas/like black sea pebbles glistening in the harrowed/moonlight staring through the shattered kitchen window.”
“Mandarin Duck” and Other Poems
“In shallow ripples bathing together in pairs, as may be seen by the deep, clear waters of Xiangjiang.”
Rossetti’s Notebook (1862-1869)
“Nonetheless, a worm/had eaten its way through any number/of Gabriel’s lines, some of his best./He had to reconstruct them from memory,/or compose them anew.”
Let It Be Known
“On its dead claws and back, mottled and plain,/from a long beach whose gulls roost on an edge,/Inscrutable.”
“I ask your forgiveness; I am a mountain tiger”
“Why does she ask forgiveness?/For what and from whom?/Why does she call herself/a mountain tiger?”
Life Cycle of the Cabbage White Butterfly
“Examining for mixed motives the flaws/That turned their city-cousins ash-/Grey. She labels one Snow-in-Ghana,/As though she doesn’t trust her own desire.”
The Return
“I am alive and you’re alive, and hope exists,/but I have to bid farewell to these words of mine,/which I will never shout, because I’m but a man. “
The Indian and Draw Near, White Man
“And working together, what might we become?/citizens of a single kingdom./you could find it all in the palm of your hand/alongside Indian, yellow and black.”
Walking the Butter Mill Trail
“I sometimes think I don’t belong here/in this wood–that the tree’s knots/are frowns grown for me, or the leaf crunch/is a worm cracking a crass joke at my expense.”
Turkey Buzzard
“Here on a narrow one-lane/overgrown with cattails and ivy/the circle of turkey buzzards draws closer.”