We dust what shows—candles without flame, figurines
frozen in dance. Rituals exhausted, we wait
for our guests. It doesn’t take much to slip back
to second grade where Mrs. Goldfarb clears her throat
eternally, where the faceless boy wets his pants, pissing
a stream that threatens to carry us away. Or further
back to where the yard is a jungle, where we claw
mossy earth or risk being sucked into darkness
that waits like a deaf grandmother. If we looked
into windows bleeding light, we’d see ourselves passing
photographs. Looking out we’d see trees flamed
purple against a moon-dashed sky. One of us
might notice rustling in the underbrush, by the birdbath
an untied shoe, a pile of discarded clothes, an embrace
of shirt sleeves, before they turn back into leaves
and we turn back to refill an empty glass.
has worked in a warehouse, as a security guard, in a bookstore, as a teacher for Deaf children, as a toy designer for Fisher Price, and currently as a children’s librarian. His writing has appeared in many journals through the years, and his publications include a chapbook with his photographs, The One Hundred Bones of Weather (Blue Pitcher Press, 1990), and a full-length poetry collection, What Glorious Possibilities (Aldrich Press, 2014). He lives in Greensboro, North Carolina.