 | |  | |  | |  | |  |
My poems and lyric essays have
appeared in Water Stone Review; The
Talking Stick; Gulf Coast Review;
Willow Springs; Gents, Badboys and
Barbarians: An Anthology of New Gay
Male Poets; Evergreen Chronicles;
Chiron Review; Art & Understanding;
Writers Against War; ERWA Poetry
Gallery; Christopher Street; Big Toe
Review; MARGIN: Modern Magical
Realism, and Wellspring, as well as a
number of local
zines.
Excerpts from my memoir (Self,
Divided) were selected for the
2004-2005 Association of Writers &
Writing Programs (AWP) Intro Journals
Award and are featured
in the fall 2005 issue of Willow Springs.
I was awarded First Place Winner in the
2005 Creative Nonfiction Prize
sponsored by Gulf Coast (Wayne
Koestanbaum, judge), and my winning
entry, a lyric essay entitled One
Sentence, was nominated for a
Pushcart Award.
In 2005 I was awarded a Jerome
Foundation Blacklock Nature
Sanctuary Fellowship for Emerging
Artists; a VSA Award for Emerging
Artists, and a Minnesota State Arts
Board grant. Most recently, I was
selected as the 2006 and 2007
Writer-in-Residence of the
Banfille-Locke Center for the Arts, in
Fridley, Minnesota.
I received my MFA in Writing from
Hamline University in St. Paul,
Minnesota, in 2006.
appeared in Water Stone Review; The
Talking Stick; Gulf Coast Review;
Willow Springs; Gents, Badboys and
Barbarians: An Anthology of New Gay
Male Poets; Evergreen Chronicles;
Chiron Review; Art & Understanding;
Writers Against War; ERWA Poetry
Gallery; Christopher Street; Big Toe
Review; MARGIN: Modern Magical
Realism, and Wellspring, as well as a
number of local
zines.
Excerpts from my memoir (Self,
Divided) were selected for the
2004-2005 Association of Writers &
Writing Programs (AWP) Intro Journals
Award and are featured
in the fall 2005 issue of Willow Springs.
I was awarded First Place Winner in the
2005 Creative Nonfiction Prize
sponsored by Gulf Coast (Wayne
Koestanbaum, judge), and my winning
entry, a lyric essay entitled One
Sentence, was nominated for a
Pushcart Award.
In 2005 I was awarded a Jerome
Foundation Blacklock Nature
Sanctuary Fellowship for Emerging
Artists; a VSA Award for Emerging
Artists, and a Minnesota State Arts
Board grant. Most recently, I was
selected as the 2006 and 2007
Writer-in-Residence of the
Banfille-Locke Center for the Arts, in
Fridley, Minnesota.
I received my MFA in Writing from
Hamline University in St. Paul,
Minnesota, in 2006.
Washington Suite
i. the city
Marble, concrete, coldness a sort of politic
that greets me, with half the people of the city
buried below the ground half the time.
Walking graveyard,
a voice within me whispers,
all dead soldiers on their way home.
Their way home a subway color.
Their way home a subculture,
past meth houses & the National Cathedral
where no thing greens anymore.
My country t’is of thee,
sweet land of liberty.
Outside the subway window
Potomac rips the city in half
frayed edge of cheap linen
still people pour themselves in
like sand on top of sand, each
struggling for a chance just to see
the newest rock, to be first
to feel the heartbeat that pumps throughout
this city scatters them about, red blood
cells in a vein too long anemic.
I visit this city –
both the dead to feed my body
& the living to feed my soul.
I visit this city as it hovers
over the center of the world
shoots itself up like a drug into
hungry veins. We are its high.
It feels nothing without us.
My country,
sweet land of liberty,
of thee I sing.
ii. pushing
Push, he says
the wall before my eyes split in half;
like a whip, crack trickling down,
path of tear, chronograph,
discharge of a lover’s breakdown
pouring through. & I push
as if pushing could heal.
I have been too selfish,
& this is how I feel.
Push, he says
the pillow before me a blindfold
that lets in only red light, the color of love
when all pain is gone, a loss foretold,
scent of man, rubber of glove
seeping through. & still I push,
heart open as if a beast
to be probed, & at that moment of rush
he stops & I release.
iii. bruised
the blue floats to my skin
& opens like an eye
watching the world watch it
the mark almost purple
across my bicep spreads itself
the size of your thumb
this is where you pledge
your love the words from your lips
fall onto my arm like a heavy stone
& I, thank you
when your eyes look away
full of suffering, full of need
to receive after learning only to give
so I give trying all the while to carry
your pain to perhaps suck it out
of you like poison from a wound
I give as if to push out from my heart
all the flowers that suddenly grow
like a thick & heavy vine.
I want only to save you.
iv. national airport
Reading Hikmet I ask, How would I know that everything at this
moment would matter?
The keys shaking in my bag as I walk remind me I’ve a home to
return to.
The bruise on my arm, not there just days ago, the heart that
hunts
for the right word. They tell me the visit is over.
A chauffeur holds a sign that reads Stone.
It is as though I have been captured in that moment of
imperfection, the saucer
suddenly cracks, the sky turns black, the moment alive, separated
from all other moments in time. Everything matters at this
moment,
even the phone call I make to the man who enchants me, a man I
both
do & do not want to call.
Enchant, he muses, from the Latin, meaning ‘in chains.’
This airport has similar sorrows, all of which seem vital to its
existence.
How is it that the terminal has not collapsed with the weight of
such pain?
& everything worthwhile exists in shades of blue. Even the
sunlight
that struggles through the glass is filtered by a blue-grey screen.
An airline attendant, eyes highlighted by blue shadow,
asks for my wallet & I show it to her, pull out the slate grey hide
not knowing why it should matter, but knowing it does.
We are all equally nondescript, after all,
no identification will fill in our blanks.
& I direct myself to a plane that will most undoubtedly never lift
itself
off the ground, all the weight of these people & the baggage we
carry.
All this cargo seems so important right now on this
DC/Minneapolis flight,
it is all that is left, the only concrete thing to go back with me.
There were moments we shared that failed to matter,
the visit to the Smithsonian (history seems so brief in the
present &
so temporary) The photo exhibit of couples in black & white
(nothing,
except the lines on this page, ever exists in black & white) But
these,
too, have passed, & all that matters now is the return flight,
the boarding back to my world that spins a bit slower,
where one does not fall in & quickly out of love.
This is the boarding & the boarding starts.
four letter words: hope
it was found hidden in the bed sheets
(as certain as fairies to children), though
he wasn't looking, per se, for the ocean's
last wave. he was looking, instead, for
its ebb. the quiet lull to and fro.
the gentle rocking in between
it all. that space where chaos cannot
enter despite its need to do so.
it was found in the dark skin, the brown
eye, the childhood friend, the slight new
york tongue, the greek mythology,
the immortal tattoo. the wet lip.
Temptation
The motionless ceiling fan in the dead of summer or
the cartilage that tears away at my septum or
the way summer carried himself into autumn
dressed in blue jeans & a red flannel shirt.
The last song that played in the jukebox at the bar
on the end of the street when the locals went home
after endless hours of shooting pool & gossip.
The smell of salt air on rustic New England roads.
The red of the maple leaf before the first frost or
the three ice cubes remaining in the empty glass
on the counter before the bartender discards it
without contemplating its history for just a moment.
The Jesus that followed me to class at the castle
on the edge of town. The accent in his voice or
the poetry that dripped from his pen in couplets or
the smell of Portuguese bread baking in the alleys.
The way his head now turns when I look him in the eye or
the sound of bodies releasing a seven year sigh or
his calloused fingers as they trace the outline of my lips or
the coffee grounds that connect evening to morning.
i. the city
Marble, concrete, coldness a sort of politic
that greets me, with half the people of the city
buried below the ground half the time.
Walking graveyard,
a voice within me whispers,
all dead soldiers on their way home.
Their way home a subway color.
Their way home a subculture,
past meth houses & the National Cathedral
where no thing greens anymore.
My country t’is of thee,
sweet land of liberty.
Outside the subway window
Potomac rips the city in half
frayed edge of cheap linen
still people pour themselves in
like sand on top of sand, each
struggling for a chance just to see
the newest rock, to be first
to feel the heartbeat that pumps throughout
this city scatters them about, red blood
cells in a vein too long anemic.
I visit this city –
both the dead to feed my body
& the living to feed my soul.
I visit this city as it hovers
over the center of the world
shoots itself up like a drug into
hungry veins. We are its high.
It feels nothing without us.
My country,
sweet land of liberty,
of thee I sing.
ii. pushing
Push, he says
the wall before my eyes split in half;
like a whip, crack trickling down,
path of tear, chronograph,
discharge of a lover’s breakdown
pouring through. & I push
as if pushing could heal.
I have been too selfish,
& this is how I feel.
Push, he says
the pillow before me a blindfold
that lets in only red light, the color of love
when all pain is gone, a loss foretold,
scent of man, rubber of glove
seeping through. & still I push,
heart open as if a beast
to be probed, & at that moment of rush
he stops & I release.
iii. bruised
the blue floats to my skin
& opens like an eye
watching the world watch it
the mark almost purple
across my bicep spreads itself
the size of your thumb
this is where you pledge
your love the words from your lips
fall onto my arm like a heavy stone
& I, thank you
when your eyes look away
full of suffering, full of need
to receive after learning only to give
so I give trying all the while to carry
your pain to perhaps suck it out
of you like poison from a wound
I give as if to push out from my heart
all the flowers that suddenly grow
like a thick & heavy vine.
I want only to save you.
iv. national airport
Reading Hikmet I ask, How would I know that everything at this
moment would matter?
The keys shaking in my bag as I walk remind me I’ve a home to
return to.
The bruise on my arm, not there just days ago, the heart that
hunts
for the right word. They tell me the visit is over.
A chauffeur holds a sign that reads Stone.
It is as though I have been captured in that moment of
imperfection, the saucer
suddenly cracks, the sky turns black, the moment alive, separated
from all other moments in time. Everything matters at this
moment,
even the phone call I make to the man who enchants me, a man I
both
do & do not want to call.
Enchant, he muses, from the Latin, meaning ‘in chains.’
This airport has similar sorrows, all of which seem vital to its
existence.
How is it that the terminal has not collapsed with the weight of
such pain?
& everything worthwhile exists in shades of blue. Even the
sunlight
that struggles through the glass is filtered by a blue-grey screen.
An airline attendant, eyes highlighted by blue shadow,
asks for my wallet & I show it to her, pull out the slate grey hide
not knowing why it should matter, but knowing it does.
We are all equally nondescript, after all,
no identification will fill in our blanks.
& I direct myself to a plane that will most undoubtedly never lift
itself
off the ground, all the weight of these people & the baggage we
carry.
All this cargo seems so important right now on this
DC/Minneapolis flight,
it is all that is left, the only concrete thing to go back with me.
There were moments we shared that failed to matter,
the visit to the Smithsonian (history seems so brief in the
present &
so temporary) The photo exhibit of couples in black & white
(nothing,
except the lines on this page, ever exists in black & white) But
these,
too, have passed, & all that matters now is the return flight,
the boarding back to my world that spins a bit slower,
where one does not fall in & quickly out of love.
This is the boarding & the boarding starts.
four letter words: hope
it was found hidden in the bed sheets
(as certain as fairies to children), though
he wasn't looking, per se, for the ocean's
last wave. he was looking, instead, for
its ebb. the quiet lull to and fro.
the gentle rocking in between
it all. that space where chaos cannot
enter despite its need to do so.
it was found in the dark skin, the brown
eye, the childhood friend, the slight new
york tongue, the greek mythology,
the immortal tattoo. the wet lip.
Temptation
The motionless ceiling fan in the dead of summer or
the cartilage that tears away at my septum or
the way summer carried himself into autumn
dressed in blue jeans & a red flannel shirt.
The last song that played in the jukebox at the bar
on the end of the street when the locals went home
after endless hours of shooting pool & gossip.
The smell of salt air on rustic New England roads.
The red of the maple leaf before the first frost or
the three ice cubes remaining in the empty glass
on the counter before the bartender discards it
without contemplating its history for just a moment.
The Jesus that followed me to class at the castle
on the edge of town. The accent in his voice or
the poetry that dripped from his pen in couplets or
the smell of Portuguese bread baking in the alleys.
The way his head now turns when I look him in the eye or
the sound of bodies releasing a seven year sigh or
his calloused fingers as they trace the outline of my lips or
the coffee grounds that connect evening to morning.
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |