Category Archives: Poetry

Voyager I and the Blue Planet

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I.
I wonder if you remember me.
You said, “Go out. Find me
that universe, and take these
with you.” Talismans.

Good luck charms like Mozart
and fifty-five ways to say hello.
Navajo night chant,
Peruvian wedding song,
diagrams of ribcages, gender,
bushmen and bones.
Gifts for a people you said
I may never meet.

It has been thirty-four years
and I wonder if you remember me.

II.
Less and less,
we call across the distance:
sixteen-point-twelve hours
between transmissions
and I wonder if you remember me.

I nearly kissed Jupiter for you,
nearly skimmed Saturn’s bright rings,
but you said, “Go out.
Find me that universe,”
so I sail out into the dark for you.

I keep a photo of you
to keep away the quiet
between your calls:
pale speck, long distant,
but I remember you.

III.
I know now,
you will never call me home.

January Crickets

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The year winter decided to play
in the sundresses from spring’s closet,
we left the windows open
to enjoy the breath of January azaleas
blooming in the flower beds.

A cricket snuck into your craft room,
and sang to us for hours,
somewhere under the stacks
of colored paper, under the bottles
of orange paint, the bits of curled wire,
the forest of projects you grew
behind a decorated door.

We searched for it for hours,
until my hands were glittered
and red yarn tangled your hair;
we even let the old mother cat
try to flush it from its artsy haven,
until her white fur was chalked
to pink and blue cotton candy,
and the cricket chirped at us.

That night, I curled beside you,
my hand on your breast and
your breath in my ear,
awake with a winter spring song:
cricket song, white azaleas asleep,
you asleep, a last jewel of glitter
bright on your breast beside my hand,
thinking I might let more crickets
sneak into the walls of our house.

This poem was originally published under the pen name Gabriel Gadfly.

What Loving You Was Like

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Like the taste of wind escaping my hands.

Like tea gone cold, too steeped, unsipped.

Like letters, writ large upon a wall, such that
they can be read only one at a time
and the complete word never grasped.

Like time-travel science, sabotaged by itself
and terminated before it could learn its own extended secret.

Like a fat cat’s dream of gazelle in savanna grass,
interrupted by the creak of a tuna can lid opening.

Like graffiti on train cars, constrained to tracks,
observed and forgotten at the momentary
crossing of paths, but remembered,
perhaps with regret, by its artist.

This poem was originally published under the pen name Gabriel Gadfly.

The Subtle Violence of Dreaming

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Here is a lesson in violence:
what brutal delight is better indulged
than waking?

With the opening of your eyes
you rip yourself from the sticky wall
of Morpheus’ oneiric womb,
sever the tendrils of worlds
not yet opened to you
and now never to be so.

You are left with a splatter
of dreamblood upon your lip,
The faint copper taste of memories
that flee for their lives
from you, cruel waker.
Sated, you pretend gentility
through the journey of an arcing
arrowed sun.

Gloom beckons the beast from you;
in darkness and sleep,
you prey on dreams again.

This poem was originally published under the pen name Gabriel Gadfly.

The Moon, The Stars, The Sun

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I.
The Moon is too full,
and the stars are curtained,
snuffed out, stifled in their
cradles before they can cry,
because their mother is too
bright, too large, too low
on the horizon, low enough
to kiss treetops the stars
can never kiss. The Moon
loves treetops, and starlings
in their quiet nests.

II.
The Moon has strangled
herself in mourning, doused
her light in funeral black,
and now the stars dance,
fire buoys against the sea
of night so we wayward ships
won’t lose ourselves in the
black. The stars hear our tears
when the Moon is too
drowned in her own.

III.
The Sun forgets his lover.
He never sees her alabaster
cheek, nor the pockmark scars
beneath her veil. He shines,
careless, unconcerned, on
treetops and the empty nests of
starlings. He does not reach out
to comfort her. She must shrug her
own veil off. The Moon must glow
without him, but she knows only
the inward focus of reflection.

This poem was originally published under the pen name Gabriel Gadfly.

Susurration and Earthquake

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Afterwards, your lips will part and
mouth, Wow.
Riven,
held open against flustered
and flushed sheets, drawn off like
rind from the bright fruit heart,
tart sweat lingering on two tongues kissed by
escaping breath.

Worry-heart, rabbit-heart,
this is the still order of passion’s pause:
Recover before I kiss you again,
before I draw another poem
into the flesh of your shoulders; a poem
rouged, pattern-rhymed with every sound
expelled from your open
shiver-shudder lips, every sound a
susurration and earthquake.

Come, love. Again.

This poem was originally published under the pen name Gabriel Gadfly.

You Sleep, I Sleep, I Love You

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Your bus will not be here
for six or seven hours
and I am restless,
I have not rested, I am just
so ready to see you again.

I have not seen you in weeks,
but I have seen you every night
in my sleep, every night I wake up
to your finger tracing love letters
into the back of my hand.
You keep me awake; I love you

and tonight, I want you to hold me
and tell me what you want
our future to be like until
you sleep, I sleep, I love you.

This poem was originally published under the pen name Gabriel Gadfly.

Sleep Study

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Because I snore at night and wake
sometimes,
chewing on a tongue of terror,
my doctor prescribed a sleep study.

Tonight, at the hospital,
a nurse binds me to a clinic bed
with sensors and wires and straps,
an electric kind of bondage —
I am tubed and surveilled,
expected to sleep soundly
in this antiseptic ghost of a bedroom,
where someone always listens
and someone always watches.

Two a.m., half-addled, I teeter
on consciousness, stumble-drunk,
one foot in the world and one in slumber.
Stare at the glass eye over my head
and wonder what all this paraphernalia
tells my nurse about me. What
can she read on her charts and monitors?

Can she see the yellow eyes
that have stalked through
my sleep since I was a child?

Can she see the name tags
fettered to my wet dreams?

When I wake, I’ll ask her
if she can draw me a map
through the architecture of sleep
to the fountain where
my poetry spills forth,

to the spring in the rock
and the steaming basin of words
where I drown every night;

every morning, I surface and gasp
for air, wring what drops of poetry
I can out of my beard and onto the page,
and, spent, forget my way back
until sleep seduces me again.

Cicatrice

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That night, I kissed your shoulder,
your neck, the back of your wrist,

kissing scars and asking you
to tell me their origins:

the brick wall that shook
your brain in its cage of bone,
windshield glass, rearview mirror,
the knife you plied yourself.

You sat across my legs,
took my hand in your fingers
and navigated your scalp
so I could feel the dimple

under the hair
that grew back silver,
where the staples held
you together.

Your catalog of injuries
is just the smallest part of you,
but I couldn’t write a poem
long enough to catalog
every part of you
that my body, my mouth
longs for.

This poem was originally published under the pen name Gabriel Gadfly.

Filaments

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Even when I haven’t seen you in days
I find reminders of you everywhere.

I slept last night
curled against your pillow
to breathe the scent of you in sleep
and woke with a thread of your hair
braided to my beard.

I bathed and glimpsed you
on the shower wall,
a coil and wet snake
I try to divine
like tea leaves or runes,
attempts to suss out
predictions of your return.

I dress myself; brush a string of you
from breast pocket, and walking out,
notice another in the hallway mirror,
a kiss nestled at my lapel.

You are in the headrest of my car,
my bag, my books, filaments left like gifts;
they tether me to you
until your hair and you rest at night
beside me again.

This poem was originally published under the pen name Gabriel Gadfly.