One Salty New Death Poem

via Unsplash

2019: I read a surreal article about a new eco-friendly method of human body disposal. For reasons I still don’t understand, I immediately wonder what poet/witch/oracle Brent Reichenberger would make of it. I start taking notes.

2022: My poem “Aquamation (for and after Brent Reichenberger)” is out in Hecate magazine's body-horror collection FRANKENZINE. You can read it here.

p.s. Sorry Brent

Recent Work

Detail of The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons by J.M.W. Turner

Places you can find my work this spring:

• Mineral Lit Mag — "the front of this postcard is covered in flames"
• Drunk Monkeys — "I Am 5 and I Want to Be"
• post ghost press — matchboxes (!) and small poems for the masses

Recent Work

Photo: Anita Austvika via Unsplash

It's been a very fancy few months. Some recent publications:

• Two prose poems in Moonchild Magazine, Issue Six
• One micropoem in PØST, Issue V
• A reprint in Aesthetica Creative Writing Annual 2020
• A matchbox (!) from Post Ghost Press 
• One poem in small poems for the masses, volume five

Two New Poems in SIREN

photo: Daniel Tong

Many, many years ago, Ashdown Forest in Sussex inspired Winnie the Pooh's Hundred Acre Woods. Earlier this year, the forest caught fire.

I wrote about this wildfire—and some other feelings—for SIREN magazine's "Sanctuary" issue.

Read the poems here.

One New Poem

photo: Bethany Szentesi via Unsplash

A not admitting of the wound
Until it grew so wide
That all my Life had entered it

—Emily Dickinson



Sometimes grace looks like someone else saying "My heart. My heart. Is broken." Sometimes communion looks like holding hands and weeping together. Sometimes a miracle looks like a blue book about loss. Sometimes a saint looks like you.

My poem "Our Lady of Desperation," out now in the first issue of OCEANS & TIME, is about all of this. The blessing of shared vulnerability. The beauty in admitting the wound.

You can read the poem here.

Rerun Four: Wednesday in Therapy

Wednesday in Therapy

The bearskin rug that bit visitors was always my favorite. At Christmastime, our butler stood on the rooftop and doused carolers in boiling pitch. The mansion had trap doors, maim-you-if-you-misjudge-the-exit secret passageways. Carnivorous vines as silent as boa constrictors. A graveyard of gruesome statuary. The pits of quicksand. My father would throw an épée at anything that moved. Mother meticulously decapitated all the roses. Grandmama was always entertaining some demon or another. There were corpses in the closets, beasts with teeth in the bottoms of dresser drawers. No welcome mat, in other words. Yet still the villains got in.

They said we were safe
and flung open the front doors
to ravening wolves



Originally published in Moonchild Magazine.

[Image description: a color photograph of the Addams family mansion.]

A Zootopia Poem

image: YouTube // Googlemovietrailers

In March, I went to see Zootopia. 

I came home with visions of oil and water dancing behind my eyes. 

I thought about patterns, and the way we consider some dysfunctional behaviors strong or noble while others are viewed as weaknesses. I thought about grasping rabbits and flight-risk foxes I have known. I wrote a poem.

All that is to say:

"sly fox / dumb bunny" is up today at Quail Bell Magazine.

After Corrag

for you, who are tangled,
berry-stained; for you, seaweed-eyed
and skittish in a market; for you,
water baby, moon child, razor-
tongued witch woman--for you, a gift:
i am one too.

sisters then, may the grass
be sweet, crushed underfoot.
may the scattershot stars
become a blanket we, alone, can share.
may we find peace in what enwilds us.
may what was lonely grow
to make the full use of our hearts.



art by Melissa Peck
Read more about Corrag in Susan Fletcher's incredible book Witch Light.

Lady Lazarus in the Bath

I have done it again.
One week in every seven
I ruin it.

Bones in the basin
And the sodden skin
Above it; I roll

On a beaded spine
And stain the fever liquid
With my rust.

The water in the
Curtain's shadow--
Once faucet-sweet--

Now might be the ocean's.
I leave my poppy-petal
Pigment in the tub.

These are my roots
My lashes now.
I may be tarnished silver;

Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.
The first time it happened I was scared.
It was an accident.

Now in voluntary
Madness I submerge,
Then, dripping my undoing, stand:

Out of the water
I rise with my wet hair
And only ashes to wear.





original poem here.
photograph by Pennie Naylor.

Phosphene

Man, you are man, mosaic--
One shimmering image, three kinds of smiles,
Ten frowns--

We think of loss
As a hammer; juggernaut;
Bowling ball; forest fire;
The river, shaving stone. I
nevitable.

But loss
Is an a
mbush, and each wind
Blinds me anew
With handfuls of sand

That were tiles


That were blue

That were gray

That were blue

Green eyes.

Lady Suo's Clavicle: A Corollary

after Lady Suo (11th-12th cent.)

That early fall night
When I woke to find
Your sleeping cheek (warm weight
On my shoulder) may never
Have happened,
But the dream is nearly enough.





photograph by Ani Eleuterio

To the Wizard of Menlo Park

You should know it doesn’t count
If you cheated, and you should know
We know you did. Who but a time traveler
Would sweat until the filament formed;
Who but the one who has known silver dawn
Would bother to burgle one trip
To the moon? There is no sport
To this brilliance. Your fizzing chariot
Awaits in the alley:
Be gone, and leave us our fire.





more on alleged intellectual poacher Thomas Alva Edison here
watch "Le Voyage dans la Lune" here

Ode Upon the Poem I Can't Remember

Horse. There was a horse,
and a tall girl also. I want to say one blue eye,
one green, but maybe that was the horse?
He broke her heart--the poet, that is,
broke the girl's heart,
not the horse's. I think.
It all comes in sepia flashes,
as though I'm the one writing it.

A rusted car is parked and stuck
armpit-high in the meadow; abandoned
or occupied I can't tell.
Blonde grass; a sheepish kiss
in porchlight before
she creeps in after curfew.




photograph by Rico Moran.
Does anyone have any idea what this poem is? I'm starting to believe I dreamt it, but my dreams are never this well-composed or meaningful.

The House of Spirits

after Sarah Winchester, 1839-1922

When I was born this town was young;
The street lamps had yet to be hung,
The infant dust lay in the street
And slept upon work-hardened feet
In coarse boots in the sun.

Great rooms will not bring back my son
Or husband; living has become
One endless staircase, incomplete.
(When I was born this town was young.)

I sought domestic refuge from
The spirits, every single one
A victim of my husband's heat,
His enterprise, his greatest feat,
the way the West was won--
When I was born, this town was young.





Sarah Winchester, heiress to the Winchester Repeating Arms Company fortune, believed that her family was cursed after she lost both her husband and her son. She sought the guidance of a medium, who told her to move west and build a house for all the spirits--the ghosts of all those poor souls killed with Winchester rifles--and that should Mrs. Winchester ever cease construction on the house, she would surely die. Mrs. Winchester did as she was told, and moved to San Jose, California, where she began building what came to be known as the Winchester Mystery House. Construction did not stop until the heiress died at the age of 83; years of useless additions turned the house into a labyrinth of doors that led nowhere, staircases to the ceiling, and everywhere windows, steps, ladder rungs, in multiples of thirteen. You can learn more about the Winchester Mystery House here.

photograph by Shawn McClung

This is Just to Say

after William Carlos Williams

Yes, I've seen the plums,
and yes, I ate them,
and yes, I knew.

But what else
would make you
come looking for me?
The flecks of juice on my neck
are so sweet.




photograph by Frenchie Allen

After Three Days of Rain

The white irises
are rumpled, look like
your sheets in the morning.






iris photograph by Mike VanDerWalker

May in Coventry

after Leofric, Earl of Mercia, husband to Lady Godiva

When your armored ears know only
the clash of spear and shield, when
you are unaccustomed to the sight
of verdant fields, when success
is measured in remaining limbs and eyes,
her voice sounds far away, and you cannot
be bothered to listen.

A battlefield wager, a joke tossed away
over a fur-trimmed shoulder. You will not
hear her leave the room, best dress trailing
in a wake like a twig on the water.

But clear as day now, the clop
of your best stallion on the cobbles
of the town square. Birdsong is stilled,
the market shuttered. With one cheek
to the window you can nearly discern
the wind lifting her hair.



more about Lady Godiva here.
painting by John Collier

Barnard's Star

after Ann Druyan

I send for you my heartbeat,
the rhythms of my latest dream.
You are just now finding the frozen clicks
of muscles, cooling like just-parked cars.
Through endless fields of fire and dust,
we send whale song, one noisy kiss.

Every other romance
is nothingness now, every whale
a great cage of bone and blue air.
But fast to you, bright Ophiuchus,
one whispered love is dancing.





More about the Voyager Golden Record here.
Ann Druyan, Carl Sagan's widow, tells her love story here.

The Letter She Left on the Table

after Bonnie Parker (1910-1934)

"You think I'm still good-looking, honey?
But no, I am faded and spent,
Even Helen of Troy would look seedy,
If she followed the pace that I went."

-from "The Street Girl"



So Mama, I'm going, I'm sorry;
We won't be returning this year.
I'll try and send you more money
With someone who passes through here.

He's not a bad man at all, Mama
but life shaped him wild and lean.
He says that someday we'll be married--
I think we both know what that means.

So Mama, I'm going, I'm sorry;
but tonight the stars all say yes.
Don't forget my love in a hurry;
Love alone will survive this mess.

The Death of Pan

A divine voice hailed him across the salt water, "Thamus, are you there? When you reach Palodes, take care to proclaim that the great god Pan is dead."

This is, of course,
ridiculous. Show me a grave.
Show me a meadow
in the damp nights of June
that does not flatten
under the backs of laughing lovers.
Look you here, in the whorls
of my beard, and tell me
I am dead. Lift your head.
Breathe in deep.
The grass you smell
has not been trampled
by Christians, sir:
that music is not
of the chapel.





painting: Pan and Psyche by Sir Edward Burne-Jones