Published in the Looking Glass Review.

Birds dropping out of the sky: burning,
and dropping out of the sky. Stars gone,
sun gone, nothing but thick darkness and fear:
ghosts wander dangerously in the smoke.

Dread has its own clarity, its own sharp edges—
no-one is the same having felt it. Too late to leave,
roads closed, flight cut off, people huddled together
close to water. The wind is about to shift.

Poetry Sunday on WCAI.

At home in the country of my childhood, I went to the markets
and saw the numbers
tattooed on skin become old, a sleeve

falling back from a forearm, the ink of the camps faded and wrinkled.
That was when I stopped telling people
I’d survived a test, or an awkward

Published in The Avalon Review.

And on a night like any other night,
when the barkeep cut him off
when the girlfriend cut him loose
when his only option was a razor under
a flickering florescent light—

Published in the Blue Collar Review.

For the 19 members of the Granite Mountain Hotshots killed protecting the town of Yarnell, Arizona, when a wildfire went out of control on June 30, 2013.

Hotshot. They say you have to love it a little to hate it so much
and on a day like any other day a fire

like any other fire surrounded and took you: burnover, they
call it, when there’s no place to go but

into the flames. Watching the fire come nearer and you’re already
closer to it than anyone else would dare, hotshot,

Published in the literary journal The RavensPerch.

For the three activists abducted and murdered in Neshoba County, Mississippi, in June 1964, during the Civil Rights Movement.

Celebrate this day as solstice,
the beginning of sunshine summer
that brings life to this tourist town
long bright days

lengthening into sunsets,
the smell of suntan oil and frying food
but the sun always sets,

Published in literary journal The RavensPerch.

The man in the seat ahead is impatient.
Not fast enough, he says.
The wrong brand of Scotch.
The flight attendant keeps smiling,
even though she’s been up
eighteen hours, hearing him complain
for the past five.

Published in literary journal The RavensPerch.

My mother (dying of cancer, smoking
until her last breath), angry
about research dollars: those people
don’t deserve it. They brought
this on themselves. She never saw

the irony.

Published in literary journal The RavensPerch.

For Anita Hill, who did her best.

You remember the film where the man played a trick
on the woman’s mind? He hid her keys

over and over until she believed in her own insanity
rather than his cruelty—an easy thing to do.

Published in literary journal ZINDaily.

There was another suicide yesterday
on the beach, by the sea: the dunes behind him, the ocean in front,
on the second day of April.

Published in literary journal ZINDaily.

My aunt died in a cellar under the old City Hall.
I don’t know how she’d come to be there

or what exactly they did to her: there were rumors
but by the time I was born they were almost

all dead, the ones who could have told me.

This poem won the Outermost Poetry Contest judged by Marge Piercy.

The planes flew into Manhattan and the white people asked,

why us?
We thought we were safe.
Living in the luxury of that delusion, we baked Disneyland cakes
and God wore the red, white, and blue; our anger when proven wrong
was so immense it engulfed
two countries and killed hundreds of thousands…