Can’t Get No”
Gargoyle, “Greyhounds”
Grey Borders, “Girls,” “Actor,” “Dancing at Lake Montebello,” “Homeleaving,” “Elegy for Alice,” “Love Drunk”
Grey Sparrow, “The Good Father,” “Engineer”
Highland Park Poetry Muses Gallery, “In Louisburgh, County Mayo, Thinking of Dublin”
In-flight Literary Magazine, “Suze in Midsummer,” “The Shadow of the Lost Object”
Irish Literary Review, “The Dying”
Journal of Applied Poetics, “Armistice Day”
Light Journal, “My Father’s War,” “My Mother on My Cousin’s Wedding Day”
Little Patuxent Review, “I Learned That Marilyn had Died”
Lost Sparrow: Porcupine, “Deep Midwinter After-Party”
Meat for Tea: the Valley Review, “Brantwood Lane Miscellany”
Nixes Mate Review, “Putnam Avenue in Spring”
Oddball Magazine, “Scattering Alice’s Ashes from the Pont D’Arcôle”
Old Frog Pond Farm Poem of the Month, July 2016, “Last Sunday in July”
Origami Poems Project, “Hollyhocks”
Paterson Literary Review, “Pâtissière”
Pen-in-Hand, “The Color of Her Volkswagen”
Poetry Pacific, “Walking at Day’s End”
Poetry Superhighway, “Biography”
63Channels, “Making Love to You Was Like Peeling,” “The Guitar of Solitude,” “Punting”
Somerville Times, “At the Foghorn”
South Florida Poetry Journal, “Parrot Jungle,” “Eve’s Diary,” “Sugar Pumpkins,” “God’s Thief”
Stillwater Review, “Lament”
Subterranean Blue Poetry, “Nickel Dreams”
Temenos, “More Dangerous for All of Us”
Topology, “Clifton Park”
Westerly, “Greenwich Mean Time”
Work to a Calm, “How You Were Before”
I. Girls
Biography
White girl, born in the city, grew up near the county line.
Catholic school, navy jumper, nuns in round white collars.
Negroes, only saw them when we went downtown,
on the streetcar — after North Avenue when you looked around
there were hardly any white faces. When the school day was done
the bus filled up with teenagers heading deeper into the city,
their school books stacked under their arms.
The boys gave up their seats to the girls.
I breathed the air of segregation, taking it in,
hardly knowing how it worked in this border state city
of unstated rules, takeout only, segregated pools,
separate schools, public or private, secular or parochial —
Separate movie theaters, separate stores. I graduated from saying
colored people to Negroes, still, everything stayed separate.
Brown-skinned bus drivers, trash men, busboys, day cleaning ladies.
White teachers, doctors, priests, Girl Scout leaders, hairdressers.
My black-and-white TV world:
Nat King Cole, Eartha Kitt, small figures
with big, rich voices coming from our Sylvania.
They looked so small.
That was the air we took into our lymphatic vessels,
our blood, our reproductive organs, it was our field vision.
It would be years before we’d awake (or refuse to),
to see we had not sensed a system behind the screen.
Parrot Jungle
A lizard darted up the screen.
I left my doll, half-naked, outside on the lawn.
The plastic wading pool wore inflatable yellow rings.
I wouldn’t wear the bathing suit top, only the ruched shorts.
There were no children to play with.
My parents smoked and drank beer in the shade.
One night they went to the races —
I don’t know who stayed with me.
We drove to a place where giant parrots in bold feathered coats
were brought to us so we’d hold them on our arms.
My mother was game —
I watched the birds perch on her pale forearms.
I stood behind my father, clung to his Miami jacket.
Pink flamingos walked around a lake.
It looked like a picture book, but larger, in motion.
My mother laughed. Don’t worry, they’re tame.
At night I lay in bed and heard the grown-ups talking,
low voices of the men punctuated by my mother’s laughter.
She was with her girlhood friend, Lucille.
Tobacco smoke drifted in from where they sat outside.
The night was full of the sound of ice rattling in cocktail glasses.
My brown-skinned baby doll lay abandoned by the palm tree.
I dreamed of lizards racing across the cracked pavement
to the underside of the bungalow, cool and dark
