Poetry

Celestial Confessions

Academy of American Poets, 2019 Jean Meyer Aloe Poetry Prize

She painted her wall with thick black chalkboard paint
the summer before high school and confessed 1 Corinthians 13: 4 -13

Love is patient, love is kind…
on the empty plane.

We rested on our backs in stargazer’s position
(arms at 45-degree angles behind our heads and legs sprawled out in front)

and looked up at the wall like gazing into the night alpine sky –
our eyes would relax and focus on nothing in particular,

and in every second of adjustment more stars and planets would colonize
the crisp air until a universe appeared, invisible to the day eye –

Maybe she was a stargazer with him to ignore how he
defied everything love was supposed to be,

and when she tried to hide behind the darkness of her eyelids
adjustment must have prevailed, intensifying the four bedroom lights.

How small her room would have felt,
the cursive love is lassoed off the wall and wrapped

around her wrists, pulling her arms back into
a position only meant for viewing celestial bodies.

In Hiding

From "Eldfell Speaks," Winter 2021 

It’s considered a miracle that only one person died 

-Iceland Review 

Beside the lit lamp is the shadow of itself 

separating 

from physical form – how the spirit leaves 

the body right before passing. In a sealed box 

Schrödinger’s cat 

can live and die, be kept alive by not looking. 

You can understand why I’ve locked the bolt 

and walked away, 

afraid to open the door and only find 

a chair. I’d rather you be dead and alive, existing 

nowhere and everywhere 

together, then know you burned

like the wood rafters that bowed

when they couldn’t bear the burden 

anymore. 

Photo that inspired this piece: Interior #2, 

Vestmannaeyjar, 2015. By Peter Holliday 

http://www.peterhollidayphoto.com/ 

where-the-land-rises/34 

After Burying His Second Brother

From "Eldfell Speaks," Winter 2021 

By now my dad has unearthed four homes 

and history will remember him like this – 

two feet straddling the pointed roof, right knee 

bent in anticipation, shovel tight in his grip – 

it seems each time 

the adjacent ash mound grows 

to form a cinder cone of its own. 

The corpse and its tomb side-by-side, he stands 

higher than them both, convinced he 

can uncover the buried. Ash suspended 

in between 

their memories simply hovering 

on his left 

as dense, little crumbs beginning to 

fall. 

His face still grounded in a shadow, he looks 

toward the grave and turns against 

where he shovels from. 

Photo from “The Eldfell Eruption of 1973” in The Atlantic 

Abandon

From "Fallen from Eldfell," Winter 2021

At two a.m. tissue first tears at a minor fissure. 1,100 yards away 

bodies inhabit their beds while Heimaey, home island, 

moves to inhabit them. In evacuation, hands feel 

for a yellow wall, white cross and warm face of a lover – 

the equation for touch (Q = λ/ρCp) explains these modes 

of goodbye in density, conductivity and heat. 

Trace two fingers on a bone covered in skin and the body 

meets its home. The archipelago instead guts her belly in lava bombs 

and muffles her cries with thunder. I see Megan too, screaming, 

but when she says I don’t need you to protect me, I dissociate 

from our shared womb, flee in a fishing boat instead 

to ignore the tephra filling up her lungs.