Poetry.

I like words.

This is the main reason I like writing poetry; the ability to string together a collection of words in ways that are weird and jarring and beautiful. I want to make people feel things. In all of my work, not just in my poetry.

I've been instructed by people much smarter than I, Including my poetry professors at CU Boulder, of which there were many, Timothy Donnelly, my mentor at Columbia, where I paid far too much money for a summer poetry course, the instructor of the Advanced Poetry Workshop I completed at the 92nd Street Y, and especially the magazine Wildness, who published my piece "Subtropical Port Cities."

My highlight reel is below.

Subtropical Port Cities

Magnolias line the driveway. 
When they blossom, I am
outside, barefoot, 
waiting to bruise. 

I learned to fear the things more lovely
than me. 
I learned to hate the things I fear. 
I learned to cope is to tame
and to tame is to prune. 

See how the branches fall on concrete. 
How wild things look fragile indoors. 
How tenderness is lost in wilting. 

My mother only smooths my hair
when she is upset with me. 
I read an essay on the aesthetics of
relinquishment, which is to say: 

we want to make things pretty
before we give up on them. 
 

Revelations

We do not talk about the war. The plum tree outside always looks parched. Claws at the window on dry days. I drink hard water until my teeth are sanded. Turn the television on mute, crave split-screen-company stripped of voices. Dumb and radiant. I mean everything I don’t say. I woke up with the word allegorical lodged in my throat, which must be a symptom of something.

Xeriscape

Flitting into view but sideways, a sylph
in bare feet and 501’s laughs at her own clumsy

stumble from porch to garden, hands stained
sunburn, beet juice, curated abandon like

planting wildflowers, a tender oxymoron
for when the sky burns apricot and

boundless. She does not choke on her own
caution and quiet words the way you do, a thoughtful

way to flee ephemeral. Springtime is spreading
strange roots to splinter, waiting for buds to vanish,

shrivel in the sun. Redemption and rot.
Any passerby says you have her

eyes, grin, sense of humor. You inherited her careful
hands -- paintbrush, paring knife. Sharp tools.

You soup newly spread dirt with water. She says,
facing south towards the sun makes everything grow resilient.
 

Refrain

My end of year review said I lack realistic foresight. I almost went to Albany on purpose. Imagined how you would look all freckles and dry leaves. Your smile, folded down the middle. September is not crisp but brittle, now on the verge of shatter. Planning ahead doesn’t give me satisfaction, just airline credit I’ll never use. She has the beauty mark but I am more Marilyn Monroe and twice as self-conscious. When I say I don’t want to know, I already do.
 

Conduits for International Maritime Trade

Skinny dipping in the Potomac is the kind of dirty
even Tide Pods blush at - after your skin turns
river water and fingerprint topography remember
that to tame the wild in your teeth is to let it grow
restless in a brownstone on east 20th where the air
trembles on the asphalt, reconstructs itself
into the shape of you. Less at home in red
brick and more in red canyon, tracing negative
space-ragged contours in your monuments. 
More Wild West than Upper West, 
all calluses and sweet right hook -- ten dollars says
nobody looked at your snaptwig limbs as a threat
until you were using them to master sorrow, break
trusts. And trust that forty eight miles of
pacing is beating your route into a Rifle
Falls map, your footprint of gunboat
diplomacy -- you made it to a mountain, 
but a legacy of absence is just another canyon
you couldn’t conquer the way the river
carves its place; men with ropes
chiseled your jaw, dignified straight-ahead
blind eye, your shape nestled in a cove, neck craned
counting windworn crags in your face.