Poetry

Kin

The Borders of Gaza

In breakfast eggs I crush ghost bones and beaks
and send in tongue-loads of unborn idea-chicks:

Limber lives made and unmade, thought and lost,
the twisted dead of daily holocausts.

Bland golden ovals, suns to fuel internal war,
as if either saved or wasted lives meant more.

Willed to eat without an appetite,
I hope vindictive deaths are right.

Dust, No Wind

Your mind is full of things you can’t control.
If only you could drift in dreams.  You toss.
On another continent a rose unfolds.
You stare across the ceiling, feeling lost.

A soldier lays her rifle on the ground.
Others clatter bullets in a bucket.
You curl up on your bed as if on frozen ground.
A woman ducks a slap and seems to smirk.

Something New

She Resolves to Control Her Mouth

Brotherhood

          Artane Boys’ School, near Dublin, 1963,
          run by The Congregation of Christian Brothers.

Weather Radio

Long-Term Memory

When I see “Flora”

Xiomara´s Vigil

Where will her roving husband dig tonight?
The moonlit dunes that stretch beyond their door
cradle a bounty wrested to the light.

An ancient cemetery is the site
(stray bony bits first led them to explore.)
What will her roving husband find tonight—

clay figurines, quaint pots of black-on-white?
A mummy-bundle?  Implements of war?
An eldritch bounty wrested to the light.