A shadow but with brittle bones, willowy muscles, fingertips chestnut-brown like the tobacco you dip, ambering your teeth, but where is your agate-blue left eye plunked from its socket in a whiskey-filmed fall while alone with your dogs? Daddy, toss me once more into summer skies free from the earth’s dark pull with no fear of falling back, back to our  sunburned yards, back to the paint-chipped porches, back to the beginning, oh Daddy, please take me back between your Navy-tatooed arms, millwright-rippled as steel, formed by carrying your dented toolbox to foul-smelling paper mills, check-pointed chemical plants, skyscraping aluminum factories, hundreds of miles along the Ohio before the decades whittled you down, back when your Cat’s Eye was envied by all the boys in town, and later when your hope clung for a whole family, not scattered like the nicked marbles of your boyhood, back when your handshake was iron-firm before you sit now marooned in a beige swivel recliner, before you lost your mibster marble eye.  

always forget the names 
but remember the faces 
sorry i forgot your name
care more what you gotta say 
better yet the feelin you convey 
we all writing our own stories 
others lives we’re just thumbin through the pages 
we’re all comin from different places 
i wanna come with you 
see from another view 
Let’s write each other in 
a new chapter
but love from within 
is what we’re all after 
and love from without 
like blood from the mouth 
gush when you speak 
they say nothing is free 
but love is free 
everything expensive these days 
we pay in different ways
but it don’t come from a transactional place 
and i aint after the same things 
they seem to be after 
but we all wanna be loved 
we all wanna be safe 
and able to articulate
what we wanna say 
concealing the truth 
got you feelin like a mute 
feelin like what can you do 
that aint nothing new 
somethin we all gotta fight through 
or at least try to
they aint tryna give ya food 
for thought 
they think your mind’s food 
tryna prey upon it 
it’s a scam like Reaganomics
it’s blatantly obvious 
too broke for payin homage 
put your brain under the faucet 
for them to wash it 
with their propaganda 

The poet pockets imperfection, percolates words too soon to name.

queer is such a queer word
i think i like my words queer

matter of fact i fucking love 
dem queer ass lovely 
words 

i especially adore them when
queer letters come together
to spell queer words like

love and angels 
fearless and brave

beautiful and resilient
future and longevity

holy and divine

i love queer ass truths that
speak life like

Baby you belong & God 
don’t make mistakes

i love those real and raw
queer words that jumped

out of the queer mouth of james
balwin reminding all of us

you have to go the way your
blood beats. 

queer warrior ancestors 
charted out queer paths 

for our queer asses
to be free  

audre lorde prepared us for
this moment warning

our silence will never
protect us

so tonight i’m make some
queer ass noise and i

spit fire into the queerness
of the ethers and i continue to

make my queer ass art 
love my queer ass wife

and write more queer ass poems
dancing my queer ass all the way

home.

The most annoying part of a new scar forming
isn’t the space it takes from your body,
instead it’s the itch that accompanies
whatever experience created it.
There’s this sense
that you can scratch away the pain
and continue as you always have.
We tattoo constellations
over the course of a single life,
and our bodies choose these points of fire
to remind us not of what we can’t do
but to remind us of what we have already done.
Dotage and damage both create similar scars,
yet the difference between the two
sings only in the memories
our scratches uncover 
from the depths of our minds.
Remember your skin 
and remember that it reminds you to challenge it
with those prickling nerves 
bubbling beneath the surface.

Delicate flowers 
With small white and pink blossoms
Grace the rocky cliffs

My alarm goes off:
a pocket-sized chaos
ordered with the authority of my thumb,
a reminder to check on Merdle, the dog,
who is in the backyard

where it is 17 degrees
and the snow is anchored
to the grass with a mortar of ice.  

Merdle has been out there for 30 minutes.  
I leave the office and walk upstairs
stopping at the wide bay windows to pour
a cup of coffee and consider Merdle  

who is doing an inarticulate dance
around a stuffed pink squeakerless chicken,
pausing momentarily to smell walked dogs
a block away, barking and running
wide loops,

then stalking the perimeter of the yard,
then running again, full blast,
then stopping at her chicken-friend-victim

and yelping then plopping into a snowy flower
bed onto her back and twisting
then falling asleep
upside down
for 10 minutes  

which tells me:  

I do not know
how to live.

The whippoorwill calls.
We hear it from the swing.
Piles of grandchildren
laughing as dusk falls.
Lightning bugs dance
as they try to escape
the hands of Summer children.

The whippoorwill calls.
I hear it from the bedroom.
I came to visit Mamaw
all the way from college.
I worry about her
since Papaw died.
The somber sound reminds me 
of the sadness in her eyes. 

The whippoorwill calls 
but I can’t hear it.
We all grew up and 
scattered like the lightning bugs.
Mamaw sits alone now
barefoot in the swing.
Listening to that lonely sound.

I must begin making my list
of succulents, aloe’s green salve
spread across the pox of sunburn
while I scratch sand from my scalp,
leftovers from an afternoon of salt
sandwiched between two slices of rye.
I like my lunch late after the air warms
and the sun turns its face downward.
I like my supper when the sand
no longer burns the soles of my feet.
The skin on my legs and arms
is pink and raw and stings to touch,
but is so close to you,
radiating like a sunburned child
who’s left her basket just below the tide.

this drive is cobwebbed memories,