O to be grateful
for cold winter mornings,
snow on the patio chairs
and stepping on cold
concrete with bare feet.

To remember a summer’s day
in 1963, the feeling of immortality
in adolescence and a boy
whose name is lost to posterity.
For silence, and for conversation,
for connectivity and being alone,
not lonely.

My thoughts,
my ever present companions,
and melody.
For poetry that dances
on the page, for wilderness
and desert,
for lush green forest,
marigolds and wildlife.
For another day
under the Louisville cloud cover.

When I think of my childhood
I think of windows.
Windows in cars
where I imagined
all the places I would go,
when I was finally free.

I gazed through windows in churches.
Outside the trees would sway
To voices lifting verses
All the way to the sky.
I wondered if they ever
made it to the place they were trying to go.

Windows in classrooms
were my front row seat.
To bugs crawling and birds flying.
They helped me escape
The hurtful words of other children
who didn’t notice windows.
Content to stay.
Their souls never longing
to lift up and float away.

It’s been 3 absolutely endless
months
of missed phone calls,
pictures texted back and forth
of our lives,
and living with half a heart.
Gone from being super glued together
to 8 hours apart,
my pulse increases
every inch you fly closer
prepared for our reunion
and lengthy list of plans
attempting to fit in
a year worth of missed memories
into our short month
until your plane is back in the air—

but instead of left crying
behind security
to drive home through impaired vision,
I will finally
be sat next to you,
high in the sky,
on our way to your new home.

Scoresheets with your names
scrawled just like always
On top of the columns
Instead of in cement.

These sheets are forty years old, even more
I can almost hear you, each of you.

Yellowing pieces of paper
I can’t seem to throw away,
Precious only to me
Our words, our points, our dumb jokes,

I can almost see you,
Reaching for the tile bag,
Face pinching in thought
Hear your laugh
When you finally nailed a triple word score.

Now, the tiles are silent.
The board is boxed.
But these sheets,
they whisper.

The excitement of talking to you, 
feels so overwhelming.  

I postpone opening your messages.  

Talking to you through the day, 
lights a fire in my mind.  

I fear you’ll withdraw, 
should my wish to drink your water,
seem too desperate.  

I haven’t even kissed you yet. 

Passenger Princess
Paraded from place to place
Pram as palanquin

Everything is as it seems? No.
People doing what they’re forced to
Consequences they can’t control
That thay’re bad is not their choice
Feel concern; for, what if you or I were
Forced to kill in self defense, say
What if I were pushed against the wall
Past my limits ‘gainst the garden wall of roses
“Gainst the principals of my peaceful life.

People are at heart uncommonly good
The holes they fall in are not tbeir own
Yanked by something big and dangerous
Then not choose well, just compound the damage
Innocents dragged down by forces
Temptations or neccessities
Driven on to desperation
When you meet them in their throes
Will your goodness turn to badass?

Spanish flu September, 1918     COVID-19 March, 2020    
Stay calm
No one in the United States has died
Avoid crowds and public gatherings
Hospital visits suspended  

No one in the United States has died
“A cough or a sneeze can spread disease.”
Hospital visits suspended
Quarantine is merely precautionary  

“A cough or a sneeze can spread disease.”
Isolation established in hospitals
Quarantine is merely precautionary
Physicians need to report cases  

Isolation established in hospitals
Close schools, churches, and places of entertainment
Physicians must report cases
Who could’ve predicted this tidal wave  

Close schools, churches, and places of entertainment
Loved ones die alone
Who could’ve predicted this tidal wave
of illness and death?  

Loved ones die alone
Desperate people turn to strange and dangerous “cures”
for illness, to avoid death
as we translate science into practice  

Desperate people turn to strange and dangerous “cures”
Avoid public gatherings
as we translate science into practice
Stay calm

She smiles, flashing her teeth like a flashbulb  
Her image burned into the back room of my mind. 
looking into the mirror of your reflection
i dive into your eyes with abandon
I’m lost in your ocean,
I’m daydreaming with the clouds in Your sky
And the whistle blows
i open my eyes to the mundane. 
i must go, but I’ll will return
to this island in the storm, your rocky ledge of knowing
I walk away, not in sadness, but with hope for the coming day. 

i

for an infant buried in a Jewish cemetery
in McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania

Her namesake may have a home in the suburbs.
Keeping her name alive in those suburbs, she
sleeps with her husband, plays catch with her
kids, the baby girl a floating thought unthought.

So Rosa rests far from those suburbs, headstone
rooted in grass not of the suburbs, shrouded
behind twigs and vines, playing hide and seek,
grownup headstones tolerating the pest of a rock.

If I could talk to her namesake in the suburbs,
take her to coffee in the suburbs, I’d show her
shots of Rosa’s tiny roof of a house, denuded
of twigs and vines I cleared when I found her.

But I don’t know where she is in the suburbs,
or if she even exists on the suburbs. There is
just me breathing immortality through Rosa’s
syllables of lungs, and the pebble I left behind.

She is my daughter now.