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By the time the sun was barely over the trees, they’d started burning.

Euclid stands in front of his lover’s door, open to the last hours of light.

Where my mom was wasn’t never far from the Myrtle Beach Days Inn.

His mother wasn’t there to meet him at his stop. She never was.

The cat was looking at me with an intelligent expression. It knew.

There was a shout, then a shot fired. I pressed the shutter again and again.

“We’re not like other species,” you say, a novelist at night.

I’m recalling his socks, the inked initials, the splashes of blood.

If life was exchanged, who is to say it flowed one way?

She commands, under her breath, You must be the son.

Think how you move, how a room changes with your smallest breath.

Arrows shot by the halt at the lame,
 Opinions come and go just the same.


My mother is queen of buttons. She shows off the prized ones.

I wanted my love to be everywhere, then love began to bite through me.

I have so many T-cells I’m afraid of forgetting their names.

Let’s walk down to the river, bless the paper boats and turn it all into wine.

Beyond her ampleness, he stands a small man vanquished.

You linger in the dimming aftermath, grayer and fainter than a breath.

Flesh is temporary, memory a tilting barn dismantled nail by nail.

My soul is simple; it doesn’t think. Something strange paces there now.

In my head at least, you thrive, you die in this mix of ghost and gone.

Condemned to an easy life balanced on the suffering in another land.

Salt provokes, tenderizes. Your wounds, your dinner.

Is that coffee you have, or the hell of fusion in your cupped hands?

Is anybody out there? Nobody answered, and I felt archaic as prayer.

The pen is mightier than the sword in the fretwork of a poet’s language.

“Leaving for war, Hayes wept. He didn’t just cry; he wept...”

But we do despise beauty. We connect it with softness and immortality.