3 Poems
No Parking Today—Funeral
The sign sprouting from the hole
in the orange traffic cone is dirty,
its face caked by the smog
of passing cars.
People march by like worker ants,
collecting crumbs of comfort.
This is aging.
Deathdays mask the aluminum
face with beloved skins
and now, you can read only
what it lets you read.
If you look to it for sympathy, it
looks back.
If you ask about grief, all it will
tell you is that grief is a grey gutter,
a place you can’t stay.
Circled around the sign, three old
men burn their cigarettes down
to nubs, like children
in a game of straws.

On a Balcony with an Imagined Beach
Sitting with the first bloom
of your toad-lily between us,
we sip coffee and practice addictions.
Must we leave? I want to ignore the day
and curl up with you like tangled vines,
cloak our Wednesday in questions.
We don’t need all the answers.
I can wear the unknown
like your black morning dress.
The breeze rhymes with how you breathe
in Spirits. You have a gardener’s grace,
you weight my name with tender soil. I blather
like a bad poem, and offer apologies
for my housefly mind. We talk about words,
placing “soothsayer” on my tongue;
it tastes fertile. What is the beginning
of a day, you ask. A sleepy hornet walking
between two people with decisions to make.

Pigeon in a Spring Rain
While the sideways rain
pummeled my pruned muscles,
I thought I saw you
squint at me, until I turned
and saw beautiful faces
papering over open air,
like a bedroom wall,
at the end
of your street.
You greeted them,
with waves and half-winks,
And washed away
in the rain, tinging
the gutter stream
a neon pink.
While I, left outside
with your worn green couch,
stared at the wall of faces.
They looked at me
with an awe reserved
for a city pigeon
who refuses to cede
any ground, and so
is left behind.
Other Works
The Unmown Field
by Emily Tuszynska
... Fifteen years and even I / who watched every season / of its changing can no longer / remember the field ...
Roxana Geffen Interview
by Sean Sam
... I wanted to be overt about the peculiarities of WASP culture, instead of treating it as the default unmarked category, to treat it the way an ethnographer would. Growing up I always resisted this idea of excessive ancestor worship ...