Bringing an Umbrella You bring the brolly. When it does not rain, what will you feel like? Overly precautious? Ridiculous? A worrywart? A dolt? Not me. I feel I have a magic power over the sky. There were seven times I stopped the rain by bringing an umbrella. We tape the windows and evacuate, a…

Dreams of That Night What seems like a century ago, we witnessed a New Hampshire canvas painted in cobalt, a field of sparkling stars— pinpoints of white illuminating open hay fields guarded by turning maple as we clung to one another under a Hunter's Moon— deeply absorbed in the moment— dreaming…

Those Summer Afternoons Saturday at noon, my father arrived home from his sixty- hour workweek eager to take his two sons on a three-hour hiking adventure through the woods surrounding the city reservoir where we learned to identify Princess pine and watch a frog hesitate for an eternity to snag a…

Awaiting Your Touch In the New Hampshire cranberry sunset's afterglow we are alone, escaping the notice of autumn stars as your gaze shifts to the blurry borders of a raging current cascading under an iron trestle while I realize dwindling moments of our time together as I caress your face. A…

Under A Maine Cloudscape I forget the small towns and quaint villages left behind in those blue hours before an orange sunset painted the Maine horizon— the August orb glimmering on the Dunstan River winding through cattail marshes where we fell silent, gathering remnants of yesterday's memories—…

Soon this will happen to us She thought there was a bone in the sand and unearthed its ceramic bowl-suggestive fragment. How alive are the old stories that do not require our themes or tired journals? Toothless light shard with bandings, brass stars along a rim and the seven points that should…

Plastic Jesus My grandmother is drunk, or maybe pills. Ends of syllables like unspooled ribbon on her smokey breath. We're cleaning out a trailer. Sorting through trash to find anything she can sell at her store. A box of Playboys under a bed catches my brother's eye. Mice scurry into darkened…

Wilkes-Barre Atop the culm bank slag heaps, they said, the black shale turned to quicksand slush. Curious climbers, stained black, laughed, exulted, and then sinking cried their last. Indifferent dust, discarded, pulled them in; exhumed mines crawled forth to smother them. Driving by those gaunt…

Breaking the Fourth Wall I sit on the antimicrobial chair next to my father's hospital bed wondering if today will be the day that he breaks the fourth wall. The day he turns toward the off-camera audience, the 96-piece orchestra, or the nothingness on the other side. The day he finally will know,…

The Second Longest Day Of The Year Dusk clouds hemorrhage into the almost dark sky. Gone are the dolphins smiling, the men racing chariots, the jagged mountain range capped with an early in the season snow. Plumed ladies stroll beyond the frame, their prams left behind, forgotten. They, like her,…

Blue on Blue I curl my toes into my sand-covered sanctuary floor. Another visit to ask if I ever again will fit between ocean and sky. I prayed it so yesterday in a building where they sang in my grandmother's tongue. She too was taught to search for god on land but found the divine late in life…

White Night 1. I walked down to the soccer field saw a cluster of teens at the playground I didn't mean to listen but caught their chatter a sudden chuckle a meaning I'll never understand all I could see the dark ground glittering under the white moonlight 2. When everything is more than enough…

apologies in guillotines what are these emotions doing here? i apologize to the air, again, with no relief. it has only been survival, poor, for the longest. another apology released from my lips. sick reflex learned young. another way language has failed us, the old man & his shadow. i wish i…

i had a dream about your head as a bonfire i had a dream about your head as a bonfire, & to risk cliché, i want to say i made the cloudless sky rain for you, cleansing like a sweet catharsis, so we could leave these bodies like tattered clothes & dance, soulful, in the freshly wet wind, like the…

couplets about the end times i was told i would be raptured on a september 23rd, but it is september 24th and i am still halfway to new jersey. the last time i felt rapturous i cannot speak of because the devil's art knows rapture better than god. i trail fingers down my unshaved legs, my…

polarized notes from a poet in the midst of a third burnout i have skinned poetry alive until all that remains is a husk of literary analysis and how dare she use an anaphora over an epistrophe ; what am i if i cannot poem ; i am verbose, i transform everything into action ; i am superfluous ; i…

Case Study: Envy Envy is in pursuit from the crack of dawn, from swirling abstractions of the seventh sun on canvas, from oxygen entered to zephyrs through stems; think of brainstems, of those shaped like geniuses, of synapses forming apocalyptic wires between thoughts like fuses well-lit, unlike…

time of death: unknown what they don't tell you is that God died again last night, beyond the city borders where He knew the police wouldn't hear a lone gunshot between the trees. God liked the silence, see, just Him and those stars as witness to a final confessional so intimate they haven't yet…

you find God, eventually you haven't been keeping up with Bible verses or the rosary but it doesn't matter much on the midnight bus home earbuds jammed in people beside you rain hitting the window at the grocery store when the cashier rings up the less expensive version of your green grapes as the…

My Problem is a Kidney Bean My problem is a kidney bean. I hold it in my hand. I put it in a paper cup. Stay, Stay, please stay small. You are Hard enough already, I whisper At night. When I dream, It's there, leafy and lush, a bush Sprouting long green pods, each one Full of little problems…

The Missed Portal I walk through the beech grove where wild parakeets roost flashes of electric green promising some half-forgotten myth a heron stills by the dark canal, a toad waits in the path small body brimming with prophecy my stone heart lies at the bottom of the lake, smooth-tumbled a…

Arrival I. You arrive early, squall greening the sky electric. An artificial warmth, the scaffolding of lungs. The transit on a westerly exhale from prairie to ghostly buildings on the shore. This city beyond is a constellation of neighborhoods and unsettled weather. Sloped hills and needled…

Where I’m From After George Ella Lyon I'm from extra worksheets, newly-printed and warm, with lines and lines of never-ending problems. I'm from books that carry me far away. Through a foggy pathway of muted redwoods, to a tall blue mountain guarding large clouds of cherry blossoms. I'm from…

Ode to Small Griefs Not the crushing rush of reaction to a death but ordinary, underwhelming, overlooked like a magpie's grating gossip or the food that graces our plates day after ungrateful day. A child's ice cream dissolves on the park floor like an effervescent tablet: the parent chides them…

Sally shows us a pic of her tumor It's a gleaming creature with tentacles, a root mass pushing into the earth of her. It's an alien baby whose time was cut short by a cocky surgeon. It looks innocent and vanquished heart of burden ripped from her laid out for all to see. She tells me she is…

Flowing I inflate the pillow lips against the wrinkled skin of PVC. A brief dizziness, then clarity— like a flounder lifted from pond to tub. They say the flounder has two faces: one to watch the slow decline of others, one to remember the womb's warm current. Neither side can stand alone— the…

Pre-Liberation Fire dreams through eucalyptus hair, its smoke tangled with fruit flies and the sweetness of bananas collapsing. The insect breaches the gauze and finds me— a hammerhead circling the living room, its fins nailed in air where no bird ever cries. I climb the fire escape, Philippians…

Chalk Lines Tuck a shard of mountain into my sleeve— an ember of ochre—before I crouch low. At the shoreline my mother bent close, her breath brined with the sea: the wind waits inside each step. Dust lines etch themselves into my shoes, laces hardened with yesterday's rain. Each stride grinds the…

Dream Shards of color became material— paint peeling from cement walls, flakes drifting behind the train yard. I pressed them into my palm, but they refused to root in stone, slipped away, like loose coins through a factory glove. In the workshop, sweat mixed with oil, eroding what fragments…

Looking to fill out the schedule until the end of the year. Send me your work!

Rooted Palm My palm convulses— a jolt, livewire. I cage it shut. Something throbs— no petals, only roots suturing into the meat of me. She whispers: "I was you. Or what they interred— a seed, fermenting in the dark." I bear her like a last confession. My fears twist up her stem, fracturing into…

Held I could not grasp the winter. Snow sifted through my fist, split in wind, melting in field. My hand remembers the grasshopper: a whole summer chasing, it bit me, then leapt between my fingers. My father caught that instant on film, Mother wrote the date across its back. But no frame could…

Curtain of August The rains of August arrive in the final days— not July's swollen flood, but a thin, dying stream. "Muscles weaken first," the biology teacher said, striking the board, chalk dust drifting down his sleeve. No season of birth, but borrowed garments, white gloves shutting lids, the…

The Unturned Key Lifted the flowerpot, wondering if one still waited in the dust— the key locked inside with her echo. My wife once said: "Plan B." But between people, when a door is shut, no hand can turn the lock the same. Glass shatters the same everywhere. Its fragments skim your skin, but…

The Nest Black wings darken the ceiling. Your ribs—fragile rafters— bend beneath the skin. IV-line flickers— the heart slows, though the monitor denies it. The fluid drifts like shadow. Inside you, something stirs— a nest tightening its weave. Your navel strains, a seam pulled taut. Frost thickens…

Lying Tide The moon's underbelly hangs above the reef's bruise. Thorns clutch the shrubs where a deer's shadow splits brittle grass. The sun— a tide that strains its pull— coughs through the trees. My breath stutters. I press both hands to the stomach's hush, pinning a secret that claws to be…

A Spell for Political Resistance or maybe one for survival. it depends on the day, i suppose. wake up and resist the urge to pick up your phone. if you do, add peppermint leaves to alleviate doomscroll pains. keep an amethyst in your pocket (or maybe ten) to ward off anxiety. it won't work. but…

I Will Not Write a Love Poem Because i love you like a mid-january snowball fight. screaming and shrieking like we belong in a school yard. cotton candy flush and cracked lips. discovering stillness in a snowbank, faces tilted toward the sun. warm. untouched by negative-degree air. i love you like…

I’ve Already Written This Poem But Hear Me Out it's been a year and i'm right back where we / ended / we didn't fit the first time / certainly not the second / but i'm back on my couch while dirt settles over me / like you used to / i shouldn't be surprised / i've already toured the graveyard of…

Scars in Spring The scar on my forearm splits the skin like a dry riverbed. This morning a crocus pierced last year's frost, purple as a bruise that blooms instead of fades. I kneel to it, not in prayer but recognition: we are both survivors, flowering anyway. David A. Lee is a physician, teacher,…

The Spoon A spoon is only metal until it scrapes the bottom of my grandmother's pot, its clatter louder than prayer. Holding it, I recall the wartime photos she hid in flour tins. The spoon is an anchor, hauling memory into my mouth, one sip at a time. David A. Lee is a physician, teacher, and…

Passport Control They ask me to declare my country. I say: bone. I say: breath. The officer stares. Sweat writes its own answers, tiny rivers across the desk. No one stamps those. David A. Lee is a physician, teacher, and poet, whose work explores memory, healing, and the intersections of medicine…

The Empty Chair You left before I learned how to listen to silence. Now the chair across the room keeps asking why it waits. Dust gathers faster on absence than on wood. I fold the question into napkins, stack them in the drawer, pretend they are clean. David A. Lee is a physician, teacher, and…

River Teeth The river I fished as a boy has grown gums of plastic bags, teeth of broken glass. I kneel at its edge, offer my wrist like a pulse, wonder if it still knows the taste of trout or only the rainbow sheen of oil. When I lift my hand, it drips both water and sorrow. David A. Lee is a…

Porchlight The porchlight flickers, a moth still finds the way in. Wallpaper swells with humidity, pale blossoms peel into open mouths. I touch the windowsill, paint cracking beneath my thumb, and think of my mother's voice: soft as moth wings, already gone to dust. This house remembers me the way…

Dinner in Seattle Another diner and we're arguing over what counts. "It has to be overnight," Damon says, "not just an airport layover." "It seems like driving across Kansas counts," Tim parries. No one wants to erase Kansas. It's as far from here to Hawaii as it is to the East Coast, the waitress…

Dreaming of the Yangtze Flood The stench of all the rotting crowns That drowns out every dream. A tǔ gǒu picks its brittle path Across the hut's drowned brow To find us sisters, clasped and keening. Down on the Yangtze's floor, a blue enamel basin turns— A tiny moon, a flooded cradle, Rocking the…

ghost songs september is chinese ghost month, so technically, grandma's here with cabbage dumplings. but mother tapes shut the screen doors so i don't leak through and embrace each waxed crevice on lanterns, on peeling archways, on offered peach skin. but see, i'm already evaporating in evanescent…

apricity after m.m. i must return a sewing machine my old sneakers sodden and worn down flower at the seams this spring they steeped in trickling water in gutter broth turbid until i grow in departing redwoods that squinted through the thatched roofs squinting under vapor that hangs in sheens in…

Poem For My Brother We swallow our lament like bees The interstice between the vestige and now – is anyone there? If time is so heavy Why do we wear it on our wrists? Imogen Bartley was born in the midwest (a place that's good to stretch your branches, but uproot before they become too heavy to…