Lyrical Lament: A Poetry Blog

Your melody, wet needle burrowing in pleated fabric of my layered mind rocked in the cavern of love’s scarlet womb before I bore a name,...

Bursts of rapture all of us, wandering around in our mundanity. You, me. The suffering billions who breathe. We began as points of light,...

Fear lives in the throat like a swollen moon Grief lodges there in chunks—food scraps collecting in a sink’s drain Shame croaks in...

The mind doesn’t go where you want it to. Slovenly, lulled by baked breezes Limbs sodden, limp vegetables in an oven Thoughts slump...

He. fears waking to blank mornings the empty apartment a white-clothed table set for one the growl of silence, a crescendo as the callous...

After Bach’s Mass in B Minor Dripping toward earth diagonal chromatic this blood from flesh to...

Salamanders in Silos Summer afternoons, my cousins and I played in the loft of the old barn, leaping from bale to bale, avoiding the...

That spring day I yearned for solitude, wandered from the campground, perched on the trunk of a downed tree, and lost myself Plants...

Age nine. The brick bungalow off Narragansett Avenue on Chicago’s west side a treeless street, houses clustered one after the other in...

At Paris-Charles de Gaulle Like a wildfire. It happens suddenly. She ignites. Ripped red from one end to the other. In an instant, a...

What spills out from me: vines, tentacled sea creatures slick, dark green ribbons of kelp chunks of whale blubber, red krill foam and...

A Golden Shovel poem, after Gwendolyn Brooks’ To Be in Love Love, you are of the body, yet beyond form. You are expressed through skin,...

(After Carson McCullers) There is a girl who droops on the back step of a Georgia farmhouse hunched on the sagging stoop chickweed...

At the late afternoon hour when sunlight oozes with pleasure and dust glistens in sunshafts wafting through the languid parlor mingling...

My one wish is to embody your grace at life’s end, after I have put to rest Persephone’s childish innocence, whimsical as a wildflower,...

When you look upon me, I wither shrink from the hard insistence of your gaze— unblinking as an owl pierced by a blade of judgment in your...

From a wife to her husband of 20 years You ask me, what do I want for my birthday? Please, no more things: Books that sit expectantly on...

I. Having been held under for so long, she emerges. Her beauty urgent, shameless. Sparkling eyes like the glistening gold dripping from...

When she considered your name Emily, or Anne, or Lily swelling with your burgeoning body with powdered fantasies lacy anticipation, rose...

Your anger leaves a residue in the starched, yellow room a gluey film clinging to the walls Cowering here, I cannot help but absorb it...