When she maps a route through
the labyrinth with a wand
she found buried in the dirt

beneath a copse of brilliant
yellow tamarack trees.

When it’s all so risky:
the robot that drags
the river that floods

then dries up that comes
before down that drink

before anyone sees
that a telescope is not
going to bring the island

back to her now
that everyone wants to leave

this wrecked domain, rock
smashing through
its own orbit.

When it’s loyalty,
or fear, that keeps her

standing inside this cube
with glass hatches. She asks
if she can bring

her guitar to comfort
the prairie. When silence answers

in the way only silence can.

She frees herself
of the final memory,

gets in the car, drives off.
When no one stops her—
the hatch-lined sketch tucked

inside the island’s chalk outline
least of all. She’s gonna give

the real ones away.
When we all believed
California was an island.

What was the orca thinking
when she swallowed
all those full-grown sea
otters whole? In the final

moments of her life—needle
sharp claws piercing the throat.
The circularity of it all.
Some day, the trapezoid will conquer

estuaries. Rivers will reveal
themselves to be the true ouroboros
as they devour falls,
concrete, bedrock, banks

whole. And I’ll be balancing
on the floating boardwalk.
Failing to skip stones,
I’ll be making lists instead.

Things that rock:

One hundred boats
during last night’s storm.

The wooden horse with chipped
white paint peeling off. Bare feet

on sand. Buoys beyond the harbor.
The chairs on your father’s porch.

A plane flying over the mountain.
The coffee-stirring

Steinway Tower on West 57th Street.
The foreshocks, mainshocks,

aftershocks, everything
between. Every last boy I was

infatuated with. The getting over
each one. From there, I will list

to the rhythm of the quaking bog
beneath my feet.

A fire anniversary singes
early fall before
a cool rain drenches Friday the

13th. She always dreamed
she would meet
a singer with The

for a middle name. This
and so many other
lies have seeped

into the Devil’s Backbone
over the decades. Plied
with drink, a long ridge,

a flooded buffalo
trail, a spring-fed
pond, a hidden creek,

a relocated waterfall,
a collection of ghost islands,
and that story of how

no one holds the key
to the boiler room.
The action evaporated

with those spontaneously
ignited dances. And your definition
of this is no life

does not register with her

or her
band of solitudes.
She folds

clean clothes
and blankets
each week

no matter
how sad
you get.

Her grandmother understood
the ocean more

than she ever would,
no matter how often she returned

to the island. She kept

an hourglass on a table
beside the window

overlooking the shrinking
beach. The front door

faced the water.
The great room

held the ghost
of a cathedral ceiling

from a time before
her grandfather had the atrium filled

with a dormitory
for the three girls.

As a child, she wondered
how her grandmother got the sand

(or was it powdered marble)
inside those oblong glass bulbs.

She never wondered
about the stern-looking tin angel

that stood in the bookcase
on the east wall. Its story

did not concern her
the way those seashell mornings

would startle her awake.
She wanted to pause

those tiny granules
mid-flow. How exactly

did the nearby islands
arise from remnants

of a terminal moraine?
She had no idea how

obsessed she would become
with Uncatena:

the island + the ferry.
A name she could not shake

or trace to its origin.
She merely wanted the hourglass

to reveal the mysteries
trapped within Timmy Point Shoal.

Wild turkeys return
to the hillside trail, while
I run forward—

ruining

this dawn
with my legs
for oars.

Dew + insects.

I hear rustling in a tangle
of mature trees and overgrowth
as I run by. Chipmunk probably.

Oh, no, I play what if
in the extreme: a bear,
a coyote, a bobcat, another

human hiding in the understory
from danger in the open.
I stop, look for a way

in. Oversized dragonflies
helicopter overhead.
I take their iridescence

as a sign to absorb
whatever comes next.
Parting the rushes,

I see it. The bog.

What isn’t visible:
mummified bodies keep
quiet along the false bottom.

This is no secret track
only patience will reward. This is
an entirely new language

I want to float on.
My soggy green limbs
do not resist.

It’s the one who’s always smiling
you fear more than a stone

wall of memories covered in
gregarious graffiti. Trust

twists its way into a frown
with much less effort. The lone turkey

that appears again, poking in the grass
beside the soccer field fence,

gets more of your sympathy
than any gang would.

A peloton of cyclists churns dangerously
close as you fight to keep

your own pace. You beat
the freight train across the tracks.

Wave to the engineer once you’re safely
on the other side. You’re too old

to hop on. Not ready to become
a ghost. Too scared to ghost

an imposter. You are
the imposter. Dust

still on your shoes.
Not ready to be ghosted

just because the song doesn’t live
up to the riff. The bird man’s back.

The geese are gone. More ducks
than you can remember

swim beneath the tree bent
over the lake to protect them.

No one is screaming
in the park at dawn today.

A vessel kills itself
to overcome a fear of heights

a thousand miles away, and back
here nowhere near

a tidal estuary, a building

gets deconstructed accurately
without precision. All concrete

and chrome-tinted windows,
it’s a velcro afternoon

slipping into a crushed
velvet civil twilight. You know

to stay low—an open-top hopper
filled with gravel ahead.

I am very honored and excited to be invited to serve as a poetry teaching assistant (TA) at The Writer’s Hotel Maine MiniMFA Writers Conference next June in Boothbay Harbor, Maine.

You can learn more here.

All these recollections
about the quarries
that have become water parks
and golf courses. Some were brave.

Others not so much. And you know
it’s not true
that no one got hurt.
We were all desperately seeking

to numb ourselves
from the pain
of being so young
and alive. Submerged

survivors. Suicide
divers breaking open
the waters across
Connecticut. The dead

are not waiting
to be forgiven.
Their crimes
were not in the dying.

Not your story
to tell—even underwater
with only mica and brownstone
listening. Never hunted

down, no, we were
the ones closing down
the bars. We were Woolf’s
late-night cave dwellers

watching “from some high place
among rocks.”

Note: Poem references a line from Virginia Woolf’s last novel: Between the Acts.

Skip the golf balls, go straight
to hail

the size of tennis balls.
No bounce. As if some kind

of inferior hawk, a kite
flies on the other side

of the highway overpass
before the storm.

Heavier than air, branches
everywhere, deeper puddles

than I can remember
block access to the trail

I want most.

I hear the hotel hum
a tune I don’t recognize

as I pass behind it
on the Loring Greenway.

Three different tones
(my mother would have identified),

three distinct pronunciations
of niche

confuse the rhythm
of my stride.

The cavity will not hold
the latest gang

of turkeys I see crossing
the street near that other greenway.

Light therapy involves more
than these red bulbs can reveal.

An anniversary of sorts
long forgotten, the other party

dead. I am hermetically sealed

from what ricochets off
this aged bark. My hand doesn’t

even shake or feel cold
to the touch.