Poems on Landscape

1) corralling students
island of steel
the wilderness poses
in power and overgrowth
concentration
capture the king
in weightless boxes

a jungle cat 

laying in wait

to steal their souls

2) rows and clusters and bundles

unripe bananas

plastic buckets of green

a good harvest

3) chilled brown

a line of flight

dark birds of movement

brown against blue

the call

4) meeting on the mound

in the animal kingdom

zebras and muzzles

the centerpoint of friendship

swallowing all else

Valentine's Day: Two Poems

Breakfast

Did you get coffee
these eggs are damn cold

On lover's day
others stuffed red envelopes -
A twisted knife in the
negative space of their silence

Every day was a new
argument that spit at
old wounds,
tolerate the TV, blaring

Grief is the new liquor
poured over lines
boiling in a pot
over twenty-five years

And here was a tsunami of
pink things to point. And laugh
at bitterness and fixed upper lips
a thousand cards, futile in the chasm


The Edge of the Earth

he met her with stuffy kisses
in the dark
and left a fair friend

he memorized her distant words
to make him feel closer
and hoped in envelopes
and the recesses of his mind

his throat was empty
a prize racehorse in his head
and she was there
to say that they were there

she was a bad actress
only in that
she always told him the truth and
there was so much truth
in her against him

he had such delusions
of grandeur
but now they are simpler
in that he only knows
three words
i love you

Amanda's Untitled Image Poem:

The wheel hums rhythmically.

My cracked fingers
guide the wet earth.

I hold years in my hands.

Inspired by: 

Feeling the chatter of the dash
in our forearms
a forever-dented mailbox,
lurch softly away
and
tell no one.

A collection of image poems

1) a middle aged man
straining his calves
to miss a soccer ball

2) A burnt out picture
Leaving soot marks on the wall

3) Trembling pups under
The sound of thunder

4) A professor scribbling in Latin
on a chalkboard
His love is dead

5) A child watches a lady
in a blue dress
smoking a cigarette

6) Farmers
covered with
the blood of horses

7) Chrysalises dropping open
misused coffins

A Letter to My Third Grade Teacher

Churlish fingers
Curling over
A non-toxic marker
Carried home
Lying in a closet
To be rediscovered
Away from school
My apologies

A Life of Words

a prison
of paper where
the words can be free
like a dock of ships

the scorch of
a platform where
there is most of me
like a paint-bucket

yellowed pages
of animal
find obscurity
like a tar pit

sinking, sinking