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

New Q&A in Luna Luna

"Cloaked" by Rebecca Chaperon

Q. What's something that surprised you recently?

A. How powerful I've felt.

New this week: Joanna Valente asked me some excellent questions in Luna Luna Magazine. 

Read the rest of the interview here.

[Image description: Painting of a peaceful blue nighttime scene; a woman stands on a rock in a dark body of water. The woman is nude save for her pointy hat and black cloak. She is holding a wand and raising her hands to cast a spell. High above her, the moon is distant but immaculately bright.]

Another Bird Poem, If You Can Believe That

I'm honored to be a part of Monstering magazine's inaugural issue.

You can read my poem "Ketoconazole" here. It even comes with its own soundtrack.

New Music from Squid Pro Crow: At Sundown, When I Am Busy

Here's the latest from Squid Pro Crow.
Words by me, music by Grant.


At Sundown, When I Am Busy
Remind me: 

mourning doves. Remind me always 
to live where they are. Remind me: 
that sound. 
That sound. Remind me. 
Mourning doves: that sound:

Remind me.

A New Thing! Sort of!

It's not written down, exactly, but it is the latest offering from Squid Pro Crow:
 


Thirty
Maybe it approached gradually, 
Like the three-toed sloth 
In the zoo’s reptile house. 
I didn’t think the mossy thing 
Was real, or really coming, 
Until it was nearly upon me. 

Maybe it all showed up at once— 
So fast I’d never have seen it, 
Even if I knew where to look. 
One day last summer, I blinked. 
The empty feeder suddenly 
Offered two hummingbirds. 

Regardless of how, it happened. 
I recognized her this morning 
In the ladies’ room at work. 
She was washing my hands. 
I adjusted her tasteful earrings 
And smoothed her messy braid.


words by me; music and everything else by Grant.

The Hits Just Keep On Comin'

More new music from Squid Pro Crow: Volvox Minuet. Words by me; wonderful, wonderful music by Grant.


Volvox Minuet
In one old studio my round instructor
is warming up her knees. Always the knees,
she said. You don't know what you've got
til it's gone. And then the music:
plaintive songs from long-
forgotten instruments.
My hair has slipped
from its braid. My teacher
counts, a hypnotist's trope,
and I am five hundred years ago.
The braid there has slipped too,
but there someone has bent
to mend it.

There is a pond on the way home,
a rich green plate of single-celled forms.
And in there two algae awaken.
A shy current pushes their arms
to preparation. The music begins.

Like new stars we all have been,
so blind to the cosmos and any orbit
but our own.


For more of our music, visit our Bandcamp page.

New Music from Squid Pro Crow

Barnard's Star is reborn! Music by Grant; words by me; ambient sounds from the Voyager Golden Record.



Barnard's Star
I send my heartbeat to you,
and the sum-song of my dreams.
Someday you'll unpack the impulses,
muscle-clicks like cooling cars.
Through endless fields of fire and dust
we send whale song, one noisy kiss.
Bach. A baby's cry.

Every other romance will wane
and waste away. Symphonies
are lost without their listeners.
Even the whale reduces
to a cage of bone and air.
But fast to you, Ophiuchus,
one whispered love is dancing.

For more of our music, visit our Bandcamp page.

Good News, Everyone!

Big news, too: in collaboration with Grant of the Guild of Scientific Troubadours, I've set some of my poetry to music, and may even be dabbling in songwriting. Our first team effort is a spoken-word version of "Watasenia Scintillans Addresses the New Graduates."



Watasenia Scintillans Addresses the New Graduates
She clutches the podium with translucent arms.
She is older than her picture.
She closes her eyes slowly.
We all lean in.
"Life…" she says, tasting each costly letter,

"Life is short. Light your whole self up
every chance you get."



You can download the track over at Bandcamp if you're so inclined. Grant and I (collectively now known as Squid Pro Crow) have all sorts of good stuff in the works, so do stay tuned.

Across the Universe

In a gesture that embodies the spirit of the Voyager project in a very real and wonderful way, Grant from the Guild of Scientific Troubadours has written a song called "Golden Record" in response to my poem "Barnard's Star." I've reprinted the poem below, so you can read it and then go check out the song.

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.

Atop the Upright

A lucite carousel of photos, always flipped
To my grandfather laughing on his birthday.

In the smallest corner, the fat white star
Of a toddler's reaching hand. The edge

Of my mother's brown shoe. And, like comets,
The eyes of all, drawn to my grandfather laughing.

On the edge near the table, one wooden elephant,
One half of a set, one yellowed tusk gone.







photograph by Trey Lominack
What was on top of your family's piano?

For Zoe. From Zoe. Zoe.

I am a woman built of twigs, I am
a pulsing ruby heart. I am the bottom of the ocean
and the great monsters who sleep there. There are trees
inside my lungs. I am making
my own air. I have expanded
and condensed, and in these ears
four galaxies collide.





please, please, please, go listen to Zoe Keating right now.
illustration by Audrey Kawasaki
you might also be interested in lung trees
or sea monsters
or colliding galaxies.
I know I am.

The Waltz of the Houseguest

You cannot know what the room
was like that night. You were not in it.
The night air mothered new rain at the window.
Drops played soft on the pillow. Your pillow.

Nine months later I am driving,
two hundred miles away. Still your music
fills my ears. Today's air swells
with a silver belly of rain, and each
kissing breeze draws from me
fresh tears. This such beautiful air.
This my skin so damp, so blessed. This
no small miracle.

The road runs along a muddy creek bed.
The sad guitar tapers. A new song's beginning:
a choir of hidden frogs. I am water.
I am joy. I am lost.



photograph by flickr user riot jane

A Connecticut Christmas

They are graduates all
of the Saint Michael's choirs,
these Cooks and Waterhouses
and Smiths. The carols
swing fast from timid waking -
a musical slumber
these twelve thick months - to Baroque
descants, four-part harmony.
Behind a man I have just met
I am propped on the bathroom door.

This is the year's one day
the glossy piano knows contact.
Dessert has been laid
on the gleaming buffet,
but the choir soldiers on.
Once in a while a neighbor
mouths, "Come, sing," to me
from a rosy couch. "Come, sing."
The voices are careless, sincere.

Weary husbands rock
on the balls of their feet, arms full
of fur coats. Their wives are full too.
The first glass to remember,
the second pretending, the third
to soak up the mess of the others.
I have climbed the stairs
for my notebook. Down in the library
a young tenor has won
the piano bench. The notes

float up, not Christmas at all,
but Journey. The tenor downstairs
looks for me and my flushed cheeks
at the borders,
and I am not there.



photograph by the indomitable Rachel K

Your Quiet House

I don’t think I ever saw you
In the sunlight. It seems somehow
It rained, was night the whole weekend.

The soft strains of your record collection
Stir in me still ghost-breezed curtains,
Cold legs. The hum of your voice
Against the floorboards in the dark, two rooms away
and properly occupied.

I left one burgundy hair in your bed and an umbrella
Shaking off in the bathtub. Did you hear
The music, the folk songs spinning
Without you? Did you wonder
How I lay, if I dreamt
On one ragdoll arm, or pressed against your pillow,
Or not at all?

At three the house was silent.
At four my veiled eyes caught your fingers' melt
Around the crack in the door, and then I slept.



photograph by Elizabeth Robinson

Let the Sun Shine In

Mike Doughty is a terrific songwriter, a great musician and despite all that an amazing guy. His song "Fort Hood" was part of the inspiration for my "Valentines" poems. Take a look. (And keep your eyes peeled for a goofy redhead in a red shirt.)

The skinny: Politically minded post-punk rocker Mike Doughty took to an alleyway in his current hometown of Brooklyn, along with some friends for his new video for the song 'Fort Hood.' Although the video showcases a dance party, the song itself carries a heavier meaning. "Fort Hood is the base in Texas that's lost the most people in Iraq and Afghanistan," Doughty explained to Spinner. "I went to Walter Reed last year, met some guys who had lost limbs, and came out scared and grateful. I grew up an Army brat in the '70s, when many of the adult males around me were in Vietnam, and there was lots of strange behavior that I now recognize as PTSD."

Challenge: The Things That Make Me Laugh

1.
The dachshund marching in brisk laps
around the kiddie pool,
serious as a drill sergeant.

2.
The Pac-Man faces on the CT scan instruction panel,
ordering her to breathe,
hold it.

3.
A full orchestra, chugging electric guitars,
a sweet choir soprano wailing
and bellowed incantations in broken Scandinavian English.

4.
The salamander's expectant smile,
the cuttlefish's coy wave, the cool string tail
of the brown mouse and her twitching whiskers.

5.
The frequent midday discovery
of sideways underpants.

6.
The boy beside her.

7.
The teething Japanese baby at the sushi bar,
gleefully gnawing a raw baby octopus,
tiny purple legs dangling from her mouth.

starstruck (so bright and bitter cold)

I stuck all my stars to your wall;
they fluttered to the floor.
I remember your voice, so sure and pleading,
years ago through plastic speakers.
You sang. Green paper stars settled in my hair
like confetti. We were late.
I stepped from beneath the steady stream of longing then,
constellations of regret in my wake.