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  • “Name your torture,”
    one of them said
    with a wink.

    I wanted an orchard
    but I swallowed the vodka
    he handed me
    willingly.

    “The Gorge”

  • this is what grief does,
    it eats you alive

  • ill remember you laughing, dancing,
    humming.

    ill remember us laughing
    all of the time.

  • they are waiting for some explanation. you have not a fuck to give, some sleight of hand, my dad’s birthday is june 27th you begin.

    stutter something about switching places.
    stutter something about ice.
    stutter something about loss.

    stutter, close your eyes,
    watch a story fall out.

    I’m not sorry.
    you’ve been rehearsing it,
    I’m not fucking sorry.

  • i cant even write about the last night, the dream the night you died. the tunnels and the ghosts in my apartment and the maze and me, distracted by the little girl. the warning true.

  • “grief is the price we pay for love”.

  • “But I can’t.”
    “But you have to.”

  • and i think I may be
    interminably detached from anyone
    not blood,
    but that ain’t the half of it.
    y’all should know,
    (so I’m writing it)

    I don’t stand a chance against the curse
    but I jump
    once I hear the word
    run.

    to try.
    I have never abandoned anyone.

    “This is the Hour of Lead –
    Remembered, if outlived,
    As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow –
    First – Chill – then Stupor
    – then the letting go –”

    –Emily Dickinson

    IV. (home)

  • I tell them,
    I am not writing about the men
    you see unless it’s
    my
    dead dad

    and
    my
    dead brother.

    abandonment?
    who me?
    wearing my father’s knit
    NY Giants cap and
    bereaving, stripped,
    replaying the final moment:
    hand held, eye contact,
    the knowing I had and decision
    to forgo a flowery speech.
    elision.
    the last thing my father and I ever
    said to each other was
    I love you


    before I left,
    palms on the linoleum,
    sobs held,
    bargaining,
    one more Christmas.

    it’s brevity a poet seeks.

    1. (love)

  • and I think
    I may be a masochist,
    an undervalued trait of mine.

    you are about five neighborhoods
    away reading this and I
    am heart felt, knee sunk
    in one lost picture;
    black and white snapshot
    of the first rollercoaster I rode.
    my father accompanied me,
    and recalling when he went too
    fast on the jet ski
    knocking us both into the water,
    two booming laughs,
    it is the drugs that got us,
    the suicide,
    the dementia,
    there’s nothing left.

    but I held your hand in earnest
    and exchanged a look.
    I didn’t hug you during the
    pandemic.
    I try not to think
    of these acts of
    care as anything but that
    but inconsolable,
    bereft,
    heavy cement cracked,
    it comes for me as
    failure.

    II. (sadist)

  • “After great pain, a formal feeling comes–”

    it’s in front of the Christmas tree
    one week before you die,
    alone and panicked by the
    thought of mustering
    staring at white frosted
    plastic pine dotted with
    uniform red balls
    when I feel it.
    it’s like cement cracking.
    the ornaments of my childhood
    all gone, lost
    with my yearbooks and the
    oil painting of mom
    taken by the asbestos garage,
    poverty; my enslaver.
    i’ve been writing this for you
    for about ten years
    waiting for the day I’d be
    by your bed to read the ending.
    the bargaining begins.
    (it’s just one breath)

    this is where the poem begins. 

    1. (dad)

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