poems
On the Edge of a City
As Sheepshead Bay curves into
Brooklyn, the coastal street
shimmies into town,
its flashes of light like
the glitter of a Coney Island
Ferris wheel, or the Parachute
Jump pumping its way into
the sun-cut history. I am
drenched with a Brooklyn
afternoon, like the wet-bottomed
boats floating on a slice of muted
bay. Only one sailboat
drifts to shore, seemingly
haphazard
but on course. Today, we
are just as randomly choosing
our direction, fastened
to a quick-moving city
in a lull. It is Sun-
day. It is brilliance
at work. It is a white
building shooting like a
flower to life, although the maple
and oak are leaning
towards fall,
their half-baked color
on the verge of a fantastic
catastrophe. There are many
windows casually playing
tick-tac-toe. And
even at 22 stories, a black-
winged butterfly does not
hesitate to comb the sheltered
air outside
our multilayered lives. We have
sprawled out. We are going on an
intentional trip, flashes of
light from bedecked and bejeweled lives
on a sensible outline of streets.
From Intersection on Neptune (The Poetry Press of Press Americana, 2019), winner of the Prize Americana for Poetry.
First published in You Are Here: New York City Streets in Poetry (Peggy Garrison, Victoria Hallerman, and David Quintavalle, eds., P & Q Press, 2006).
The Women
Into the circle of women
I entered, not knowing at first
the significance of their power
working as a double-pointed needle—
stitches, like deliberate words,
slipped into strong threads
in the small talk, gossip, and
debate, in the speech unfolding
that flung dice against the white walls
until they wore eyes
while winds lashed at the village square
with unruly tongues
and men wore the black
shadows of women unknowingly,
their deeds interwoven, their give-
and-take a bargaining that
surfaced even in the harshest
elements so that ultimately the women
wore this necklace of pride,
an adornment of rough rope,
frayed where it stretched and rubbed
against the corners of walls
they carefully walked around, which became
sinews of gold in the sunlight,
where their husbands escorted them,
beside their children, along the promenade,
their worth now displayed, portrayed
even to the other women who know
them silently, as they push the needle
through the last hours of afternoon,
as they hover
where the day does not move,
as they guide the thread along patterns
so neatly presented.
Unremarkable moment,
slip your hand down my shirt
and feel my heart beat
so that I can measure your
insatiable appetite and
pace myself. I hear your
metronome
tap out its beat
as your hand touches my breast,
cool, like the hands of statues
poised in a museum park
on the Peloponnese,
where hardly an echo
reverberates, the artist’s hands
now silenced on the broken
relics of an ancient age;
breeze, the reminder, drapes
the shaded grove of stone men,
stoic, phallic. Who would dance with
these headless men? If ancient stone
could come alive, what
would I feel here,
where women tended
the physical bodies of a nation,
washing its wounds, nurturing its young,
their hands moving over the skin
of politics while the words of men
chiseled into time?
From On the Altar of Greece (Gival Press, 2006),
winner of the Gival Press Poetry Award.
"The Women," first published in the Southern
New Hampshire University Journal.