Misquoted
Don’t start nuttin’, won’t be nuttin’.
-George Washington, December 25th, 1776
The mantra of our first president
guides my roommate down from his bunk
every morning, a whisper after the alarm yells.
Some people wake to sunshine,
but we had a signed portrait
of Rutherford B. Hayes on the wall,
in place of a window, Go Colts scribbled
across his black and white chest.
Funny, the things people don’t say;
how once a group of us were cornered
outside of the library, a journalist
turning to me when no one else wanted to
talk about black presidents; how a day
later I couldn’t remember what I had told her
even though the words were printed
with my name, waiting for me to say them.
Posthumous Spam
Death is no longer a silence
a month after you passed
when I get a message
in my junkbox and open
a limited time offer
for free pilates sent in your name
before deleting I wonder
what shore a response would find
once it left my hand
its bottle swaddled in sand and kelp
if where you are there is an island
collecting distant letters
the beach an inbox
where you stumble
on a name unfold the paper
and finding a shellof my voice cast it
back into infinite sea
Primal astrology
a year after our wedding
my wife learns she is a rattlesnake
I think this explains
the hisses when threatened
the shake of the tail
a rustle of poison in the air
waiting for a reason for release
I suggest it means she has a temper
she kicks my shin
I apologize
stitch a shallow wound
deep enough to scar
First Love Poem
My wife is mad at me again because
I’ve yet to write anything about her.
Leafing through my leaves inside the house,
her eyes the rake, her hands the breeze, a search
begins through dusty journals of old work,
a pause at every mention of a sun
that never captures her. She passes words
like late passengers at a station
seen through a pane of glass aboard a train;
I want to help her down with all her baggage,
arrive at a page where we’ve never been,
far from the poems I could never salvage—
the ones comparing roses to her lips,
her smile to the moon, her voice to Sirens’.
