One whirl, all music and bright color, wild horses and laughter
rutting a black circle, imperfect as π to a thousand reams of paper.

Over / under alternate faster until they blur into one current
and you ride the dun mare through a burning ring of gold.

First prize in Here and Now (2025)

after Rilke and Maggie Smith

What does ‘reconcile’ mean? he asks me on our drive to school, the way he’s bounced his ball off my default wall since he was two, and before I can thank him for asking me and not simply googling on his phone, before my mind can mesh the cheery tyke on a trike with the moody man-boy riding beside me, and explain what’s a zero-sum game – call it karma or physics or homeostasis – my knee-jerk heart is reckoning his life now with the one that might have been had his mother lived.

The stone cottage sits tacit as a tomb, quieter than noise-cancelling headphones on a windless pandemic afternoon that can only think of itself, and so opts not to think

America, here’s the thing…

I’m my son’s age again on a Greyhound bus packed with

friends and chaperones–patriots from our hometown

There may still be time to find the cosine of x. Under an à la mode
mountain of leases and loans, didn’t I taste the square root of π’s

— after cummings and Spinoza

We do not know what a body can do…
how when she crossed the street

rising in a clarion chorus—a riff’ll
split wide open the moment they
reveal before us life in the key
of song. Soon as I get my dap down
I’ll belong. I’ll rewrite her/history

That you can’t talk yet—can only blink and smile

yes and no (both for perhaps)—makes perfect sense.

You’ll find words later, or not, to correct journalists’

Grief without song could be any stone chapel built of loss
packed with aging villagers lulled reticent as rue
by a rote bell’s tongue, hemmed by iron gates and a yew

Blind to what tickles the delta of nerves there
you rub a humming with the back of your hand, surprised by the soft pulse of a drowsy bee