Category Archives: Poetry

Brierpatch

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Press your ear close.

Sometimes you can hear the breath
rattle in my chest like a bone shrugged
its moorings and ought to be tied back down.

It’s the sound of a canyon
trying to expel a marsh:
hear the stones tumble down,
clatter and splash,
the stiff reeds scouring the walls.
Stuck bristles. Sticks.
The marsh is dauntless.
It can’t be pushed out through
the canyon’s narrow mouth.

It’s the sound of a cave-in.
Press your ear close and
listen to picks and shovels
plinking on the rock.
Soon the oxygen gives out
and all the miners go to sleep,
or they punch a hole through
to the sky and breathe,
mouths pressed to the breach,
gasping a little at a time.

It’s the sound of a brier patch
growing in your lungs.
It’s the sound of a brier patch
someone has set on fire.

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

Supercell

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Years ago, in school,
I swallowed a secret,

but it hasn’t settled well
on my stomach.
I am older now and
I’ve learned what indigestion is,
and now this secret
comes back up:

My heart has always
beat thunderstorms
instead of blood.

I am all whirled up now.
My cheeks are puffed up
and I cough up
craggy tree branches
and uprooted stop signs.

I walk into coffee shops
and all these startled people
look up from their lattes
to hear the shutters
smash in my gusts.

They scramble.
They are trying to stay dry,
trying to keep the rain out
of their cups

but I can’t stop myself —
I jerk umbrellas out
of the wrinkled hands
of old ladies,
I flood parking lots,
I topple garbage cans,
I blow down birdhouses
and scrape them down
the middle of Main Street.

My thunder was quiet once,
just a rumble,
just easy to swallow,
but I am booming now
and I make the windows rattle now.

I make the earth shake now.

I am severe now.

I am a red band on radar.
Tornado siren out my open mouth.

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

Not An Hour Ago

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I kissed you
not an hour ago

and you have left me
so distracted
I can write of nothing else.

My lip is tender
where it met your mouth.
I cannot help
but probe at it with
my tongue and my teeth

and test the swollen burn
of your kiss, a sore,
a sweetness

that tastes of your laughter.

I hesitate to kiss you again.
I rush to kiss you again.

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

Rainbow

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Red.
    Never let someone tell you
    you cannot love your lovers.
    If your skin craves them,
    then let your skin crave them,
    no matter their shape or yours.
    Be alive with craving your lover.

Orange.
    If you have been told
    you cannot love your lovers,
    learn that you can love them anyway.
    Your body constantly heals itself:
    the heart is no exception.

Yellow.
    Let your heart beat in the open,
    if you can, and if you cannot,
    then let it beat in the dark,
    let it bloom in the dark, until
    it is ready for the open and the light.

Green.
    Be the way you were made.
    Grass does not wish it were a tree.
    Stones do not hope to be water.
    Love whoever your heart decides to love,
    no matter their shape or yours.

Blue.
    The only thing that should concern
    your heart and your lover’s heart
    is the rhythm and cadence of
    your heart and your lover’s heart
    beating in response to one another.

Violet.
    Fuck your lover.
    Fuck anyone who tells you
    you cannot fuck your lover,
    no matter their shape or yours.
    No matter their shape or yours,
    you are valid, you are equal,
    you are beautiful in your variety.

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

Adventure Rondeau

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If you have never known the world, how can you judge it?
Open the door to your home, step out, go out, trudge it.
March through mud and briers, scale cliffs,
stand at the tops of as many buildings and cliffs
as you can find. Find the frontier’s edge and budge it.

If you find yourself bogged in the sludge, it
is only so you can pull yourself out. Trudge it.
How will you find the grass beyond your What Ifs,
if you have never known the world?

If you have never known the world, how can you judge it?
There is wonder beyond the stutter and drudge; it
only requires that you seek it, that you sniff
it out from its burrows among the heather and thrifts.
How can you embrace life’s trial and not begrudge it
if you have never known the world?

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

A Room Full of Lights and Us and God

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When no one was looking,
we cut off the head of God
and dragged it under the mountains.
We took it under the earth,
where the sky couldn’t find it
to take it back from us,
and we loved it there.

We dragged God’s big hairy head
into the belly of the earth
and put it in a room full of lights,
full of electricity and full of steel
and full of us and God.

We talked to it. We told it stories,
we asked it questions,
we kissed it we kissed it
on the tip of its big leather nose
and we slept there beside it,
in a room full of lights
and the smell of God’s breath.
When no one was looking,
we braided wildflowers into
God’s big bushy eyebrows.

We watched them wilt
and we drew pictures with our fingers
on God’s big spongy tongue
and we talked to ourselves.

We told ourselves stories,
we asked ourselves questions,
because God wasn’t listening
and we kissed we kissed
our own little noses,

in a room full of lights,
full of us and a God
we couldn’t make speak.

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

A Poet’s Heart

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She asks me, “Is there any advice
you can give to someone who
wants to have a poet’s heart?”

First, find the poet of your choice.
Subdue them. There are many ways:
drugs, perhaps, although be sure
to choose ones that won’t damage
the various atria and ventricles
of your poet’s heart.

If drugs are
too illicit for your tastes, consider
seduction, an abundance of alcohol,

or what my father would call
ball-peen anesthetic.

Next, you will need a cardiologist
with a questionable ethical character
and a mostly-clean operating room:

I hear you can get a great deal
on them in Brazil or maybe Colombia.
And of course, you will need a
very sharp scalpel and a jar.

You will need a large glass jar
to keep your poet’s heart in,
so you can pull it off the shelf
from time to time and admire it.

Incidentally, you might give some
thought to what you will do with your poet
when you have claimed his or her heart:

a heartless poet tends to sour
and really isn’t good for anything at all.

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

Notebook

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There will come a time
when all my notebooks
will be full of poetry.

I’ll be forced to scrawl
poems in the margins
of books, on the backs
of grocery store receipts,
all along the floor and
across every wall in this
house and then I will
grab your hand and
pull you into the bedroom.

I will undress you, expose
all the naked parts of you,
and I’ll make love to you like
you are one of my notebooks
and my fingers are inkpens;

I mean I will find poems
for every inch of your skin,
for throat and thigh, for
shoulderblades and hips,
poems to wind their way
into the wisps of hair at
the back of your neck,
poems for earlobe and
clavicle, for palm and wrist
and the arch of your small foot.

I will write the tiniest poems
to fill up the spaces
between your fingers
and to fill the spaces
between your toes
and to fill the spaces
between your skin and mine.

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

Rattlesnake

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I have caught the dog
by the scruff of her neck.
I have her by a fistful of fur
and she strains
and she yelps and she growls
at the coil of scales
half-hidden in dead leaves.

My father has gone inside
to fetch his pistol
and I am waiting,
I watch the snake
and it watches me.

The stony slit-eyes narrow.
The tongue spears the air,
tastes the dog, tastes
the cold sweat under my arms.
The fangs are hidden in the mouth
and I am trying to remember
the length of the strike,
to gauge the distance between
my body and venom,

but my brain is buzzed,
the sound of the shaking tail
like a thousand hungry locusts:
it sets the teeth, it raises the hackles,
it says I am angry and frightened
and I bite! I bite!

and then Crack! Crack!,
my father has put
a pair of ragged holes
in the serpent’s head.

— I must still hold the dog,
until the shovel blade
clips the head from
the body still writhing,
until the head is buried
and can no longer bite,
and then I can let go.

I count the rattles,
one, two, three
thirteen in all,
and a body longer than I am tall.

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

The Emergency Jar

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Three days after you moved out,
I found a jar in the freezer
labeled in black sharpie with
OPEN ONLY IN CASE OF EMERGENCY
and I’m not sure what it contains
or how long it has been there.

The glass is frosted over
and the lid is frozen shut
and it is not an emergency
right now
but I want to take that jar out
and crack it open in the sink
and find out what
you felt was so important
it needed to be buried
in the shivering cold
behind the peas and the popsicles.

Every so often,
when I cannot sleep
and I am thinking of you
I go downstairs to the kitchen
and open the freezer door,
stand with the cold fog billowing out
and I look at the jar you left for me,
wondering what emergency
could be greater than
finding myself without you.

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