Poems & Prose

Cat paintings by my talented mom.

Cat paintings by my talented mom.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

F R O M E R O S , U N B R O K E N

B r e a k i n g  u p  w i t h  E r o s

—ending with a line by Frank Bidart


This morning, for example, I miss
your heat: how you flare my skin

into a sun, whipping my cold
dead planets into orbit. To slip

beyond the body’s gate, glide
through its chain-link fence. 

I need to find something beyond
just the physical—I’ve had enough from

Column A—proof you’re more Apollo,
less Saturn Devouring His Son.

Mostly I want to be done with you.
Take a match to my fingers, grip

the shiny toilet with both hands, heave—.
Then it’s night again. I’m out,

walking back after dinner, the air soft 
as chalk on heavy paper, my pores

are open, ears open, I feel the bricks
of the courthouse crumbling, smell the ivy

crawling across them, bittersweet—
it’s you I want again, your monstrous

light knocking my stained-glass window, 
black ink of you raining swift down

parched map of me, blurring all my capitals.
That, at least, was irreparable.

—First published by Pleiades, 2018


excerpt from

A H Y S T E R E S I S L O O P


For any phenomenon there is a shape—dashed lines, points in a plot.

: a loop, say a fountain pen’s italic f. 

I want to tell you that it’s beautiful.

 

•

 

Sir James Alfred Ewing, studying earthquakes in Tokyo—
it was the Meiji era, late 1880s, Brahms hard at work on his third piano trio—
discovered that magnetic force, when applied to pianoforte wire, both saturates 
and flees the wire at the same rate, creating a mirror image over time, chartable 
over time. There was a lag, however, between cause and effect. 

He named this hysteresis.

            

Fig. 11

 

Pianoforte Steel wire 
Normal temper 

 

•


From the Greek verb hystereo:

I am late, I fall short, I lag behind. 

 

In his 1885 paper, Sir Ewing framed it thus: “When there are two qualities M 
and N such that cyclic variations of N cause cyclic variations of M, then if the 
changes of M lag behind those of N, we may say that there is hysteresis in the 
relation of M to N.”

  

:  variations of a father  
on a daughter and the daughter’s changes to 
herself    variations on the daughter charting 
how her father changed her self   variations
of a daughter struggling to erect a worthy 
image of herself how she lags behind 
herself

 

It’s not the truth you want—
it’s the process,
 

walking back tonight, one foot
ahead of mine crossing traffic,
my husband says.

    Quick steps,
involuntary motions—
one moment, next, the way our lives
stitch into place behind us,
disappearing if we look.

Red light: a car stops, bass rumbling.
You’re right, I say. 

Though it’s not enough.

•

—First published by Beloit Poetry Journal, 2018


selected poems in print journals & Anthologies:

SELECTED POEMS & PROSE ONLINE:

  • “Notebook Practice”: DMQ Review, August 2022

  • “(foreigner; perpetual)” and “쌍꺼풀”: The Adroit Journal, April 2022

  • Interview by Rebecca Morgan Frank: The Florida Review, Aquifer, March 2021

  • “Post-”: Plume, April 2020

  • “Lost Loves Night at Sara’s Virtual Wine Club” (short story): The Enneadecameron, April 2020

  • “The Possibility of a Walk” (guest blog): The Marvelous Paragraph, April 2020

  • “Uses for Music” is a digital chap published by Mudlark (March 2020), made up of the Farinelli letters and dialogues between Scarlatti and Farinelli, and a few other poems from Eros, Unbroken:

Confession | Uses for Music
Dear Riccardo (Madrid. Winter, 1727)
Dear Riccardo (Madrid. Spring, 1727)
Everything Swims | Fire Chasing Air
To Hold Something Close
Bright Skin of a Snake

  • “Collector, Self: Martha Silano, Callista Buchen, Chelsea Wagenaar:” DMQ Review, Winter 2020

I saw this incredible exhibit, “Passage, 2004,” by Roman Ondák at the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich. “500 Japanese steel workers were each given a bar of chocolate and asked to mould sculptures from the silver foil wrappings after eating the choc…

I saw this incredible exhibit, “Passage, 2004,” by Roman Ondák at the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich. “500 Japanese steel workers were each given a bar of chocolate and asked to mould sculptures from the silver foil wrappings after eating the chocolate.”