Poetry

At Woodlawn

Three Haiku

The curved universe reflected in this puddle Let us break our stride

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

“hide in the bushes,/imagine we’re soldiers on patrol,/evading the Krauts and the Japs.”

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”

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

“And then a tide of blood fell back in me/after that I walked with open ears/I found that the trees had voices, and/they sang like forgotten, sunless seas.”

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”

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.”

Show and Tell

“In the actual, from which another life/Is straining to burst, to set out in navigation,/Or be swallowed by demons in the leaves.”

Smart Fish Don’t Bite

“One of these days,/the guy with the rod won’t be so kind./This is why we hear about the liars,/hypocrites and crooks like Spiro Agnew,/Richard Nixon, Jimmy Swaggart,/Bernie Madoff, Sam Bankman-Fried…”

Journey Through Mountains

“So many stars and mountains, crests and sky,/Are we not fools to think that we can know/What underlies such intricate designs?”

Burma

“My mad uncle had the Burma jungle/In his head—burnt-out tracts of history/He’d stalk in ambush of his sanity”

Death of the Polar Explorers

“Doubt/Never stunned the marrow in their bones/Who rose above the merely physical,/And if they faltered, it was only once—”

Cycling at Vésinet

“Her long hair, the color of her pants,/falls down her back. She has what appears to be a flower tucked behind her left ear.”

A Taste of Poetry from the Late Tang Dynasty

“Insects fall silent amid the sedge and cranes grow restive in the treetops,/Sensing this busy world no longer cares for the sentiments of old.”

Sarcasm

“You returned to Rome Augustus triumphant./King of defeated nation I trailed behind./To this day the senators can’t tell/which of the two wore the wreath.”

For Love Nor Money

“Every object, rests on its certain devaluation/In the implacable fact of an ending—decay,/Dissolution, death—from which another/New thing and its solicitation emerges.”

One Little, Two Little, Three Little Indians

“There’s also a roadside historical marker/noting the massacre of the Lee family/by ‘an Indian war party’ in 1782.”

Prima Facie

“‘Sometimes all a man needs is a horizon/in which to vanish,’ I thought.”

Like Hosea

“Or was it the Living God/Who did do this,/And not Hosea?”

Dying in Amsterdam

“What magnificent coordination. A ballet/on wheels. Impossible, but there it was/day after rainy day, not one collision.”

On the Road to Damascus

“So here I am in the Radnor Township/Police Department Drunk Tank/in a white paper jumpsuit, shoelaces/removed to be sure I don’t hang myself…”

Dictionary

“Sometimes—in the middle of fair night—/when disobedient moon turns vandal/and violently rips off the bolts/of my window-shutters, my eyelids…”

Bird Life: A Triptych

“No thought, as that of mine, to complete the bare/Purpose of their being, which is to feed and breed,/Become another edible, leave another seed.”

The Lie of the Land

“And because you are beautiful do not think/The Nereids will hear you, or Neptune wake/And the sea calm, and you will not sink”

Traffic

“And where, but in constant circularity/Is all this moving headed?/The answer Cannot be death…”

The Tide

“‘Where now security, what to trust?’/The cycle of an invisible moon has/Our harbor in its force, another period/Has begun: the existing limits to be tested.”

Love Makings

“Yet there is no one thing, no attribute/Of yours that I can fix on, nothing/I can abstract, describe, isolate…”

Five Poems of Neighborhood

“‘What have you got there?’ ‘It’s snapper.’/“Did you catch it?’ ‘No, my dad caught it—/He says to watch out for any tiny bones.’”

4 x 9

“Anyone who keeps/A compost heap knows the whole of life”

Dimorphism

“And that we might as well stop killing one another,/because everyone who lived during the French Revolution is dead anyways.”

As the Leaves Begin to Change

“In that waltz, you find me now/Singing, dancing, with the moon”

Youth

“and Pastor speaks with God, while I/repent my youth that/like the flower which fades/has been my secret, golden calf.”

Fly Fishing

“What does it bring to light?/What meaning is there to land?/Have you killed a bit of me? I doubt it.”

Silver Lining

“The silver lining is/you won’t be catching planes/to drag yourself away”

Woodmont

Famous First Words

“All those routines!/And unhappiness can be alike.”

Footnote to Larkin

“We should also be kind while we may.”

Oncology

“More truths than cancer creep beneath our speech.”

The River Walk

“They bring us here, to a place/Elsewhere, where there is no motion”

Epilogue

“The citruses will still bear fruit, and if not these,/There will be others to form the soft flesh/Of oranges, new limes: all creating in their rot.”

Warding off Scurvy

“Because there’s little more to friendship than warding off scurvy or having a catch.”

But Thinking Makes It So

“Thinking leads to Hell. The way is wide…”