Recent Poems
Annunciation
For my sins I live in the city of Baltimore
Immutable as it staggers into the sea its crooked shore
Uncertain of any harbor, impure and beautiful
Like a cigarette butt in last night’s drink.
So must I also think like Poe with an aching head
Of dark and transcendent things that drift from those alleys
Follow us back to our little blue home. Let these poems
Be our fiery word in these haunted streets, turning all shades
But our own to things as real as stone where we can read
Our death has not been written yet. Even with monsters
At the edges, it is a map where we can live, this city they
Keep building as it falls, the water’s current carries everything
Away but what we feel, who we loved, where we went that
Night for crabs and beer. It will never be more real than here.
“Annunciation” was selected for the Best American Poetry 2025 anthology.
Tapping lightly on my stained ceiling, but
no rain comes. A hiss of warmth as the vase of
glads syringes citrines, pinks, ciphers
of shimming color in a dim room a day
from home. The sun turned inside out. Everyone asking
you to write a real poem now
asleep and you alone, or no. Others actually listen.
Dying fireplace fixtures the room
warms up, the plucky page fills out
the blanks one's mind makes even
after the woof of words falls off, away.
In the Wordsworth house, the drapes
are being copied by hand, the Charles flows darkly under
ice, in night school he learns his first American sound.
From the forthcoming 2025 collection, “On Down the Line” by UnCollected Press.
