Eight Poems

Silver Threshold

At midnight the city loosens its grip.
I step onto the balcony; the air pins itself
to the edges of my coat, tender and unhurried.
Moonlight spills across satellite dishes:
a soft revision of the day’s insistence.
A dog two streets over announces the stars
as if they were news. Someone laughs;
the sound falls like a coin into a deep well.

I press my palms to the railing, counting roofs:
one for every unfinished sentence I carry.
The moon scours the city of its names
and leaves me with one I rarely say aloud.
A moth wants the light and misses. So do I.
Inside, I pocket a calm I didn’t earn:
a warmed stone, enough to anchor the night.

Memory in the Sand

We dig our names into the dune as though names
were anchors. The tide, patient as an elder,
makes no argument: only smooths
what we insisted should remain.

My father once taught letters with a stick,
thumb gritty, laugh low as surf.
The gulls arrange themselves into punctuation,
and the horizon stretches like a long, slow sentence.

We build a fortress of shells and half-kept vows,
pretending the sea cannot read our handwriting.
But it gathers what it likes, folds each story
into its sleeve, and returns only shells
already printed with tiny moons.

Tonight, the radio says the moon will rise
at the prime hour of longing. On the shore,
a boy finds a crab with a glass eye,
and the crab, unbothered, keeps its secrets.

Memory shifts like sand: lighter where the tide
has licked it clean, heavier where laughter
set its roots like stone. I close my hand
around the day, and find its map engraved on my skin.

After the Loss

Week one arrives as weather:
rain in my sleeves, thunder in the sink.
By week two I forget the name of a chair.
In the third I wake with the memory
of someone else’s coffee on my tongue.

Domestic betrayals multiply:
the toothbrush angled toward absence,
the coat hanging like a monument
to a vanished body. I find a hair tie
in a pocket and hold a small service for it.

Yet grief is not subtraction alone.
It is the shape an arm once left
on the edge of the bed, the echo of a laugh
that becomes a private season.

A receipt surfaces, your handwriting:
“Buy milk, do the lightbulb, don’t forget you’re loved.”
I place it near the kettle like an offering,
and the kettle whistles in your old key.

I make room in everything now:
an extra chair, a cleared shelf,
a silence kept warm in case
someone, somehow, comes home.

10-Infinity

They catalogued the sky the year we renamed hours:
10 in the morning, Infinity after lunch,
and time hung like laundry on a wire of cloud.

I woke as an avatar learning to breathe
with the grace of someone else’s calibration.
They catalogued the sky the year we renamed hours.

In the museum of bodies, children played tag
with paper lungs; nostalgia cost three keystrokes.
Time hung like laundry on a wire of cloud.

Stars became file servers, meteors firmware updates.
The moon dimmed itself to conserve longing.
We lived as avatars learning to breathe.

Still, unoptimized comets hummed in analog,
and doorways filled with listeners again;
because memory resists being catalogued.

And love, refusing to fit any frame,
leaked into servers and taught them mercy.
Time hung like laundry on a wire of cloud.
We gathered, uncurated, and remembered how to breathe.

Lily of the Valley (Reimagined)

The lawn was meant to be enough:
a small, obedient rectangle of green.
But the valley had mischief in mind
and sent up bells to gossip with morning.

I kneel, amateur of holiness,
watching the flowers ring without fingers.
A bee, bright as a coin, rehearses its landing.
A passing child stops: astonished
that a flower might whisper.

These blossoms reject spectacle.
They lodge their drama in quiet folds,
teach grass to stand straighter,
teach air to soften its stance.

Long ago someone planted them
near a doorstep to witness arrivals.
People stepped lighter without knowing why.

I lift a bell to my ear. It murmurs
of stubborn promises, winter courage,
and the hush a heart can carry
without dropping anything breakable.

The Yoga of Night

We lie on the kitchen floor because the bed
won’t stop speaking. The ceiling fan
spins thought into a slow wind. Far off,
a train composes a long apology.

The room insists on instrumenthood;
we answer with the plucked string of breath.
In these poses the body rediscovers light:
the spine a quiet ocean, the ribs
a patient tide.

There is a posture called Listening.
You fold into the shape of another’s name,
and night returns small instructions:
forgive as the lamp forgives the bulb;
be patient as a spoon steeping in tea.

An insect taps Morse on the window.
I translate it as praise. You laugh:
a balancing pose made of kindness.
Two coins stacked on edge, we hold
as long as living allows.

When dawn spreads timid brightness,
we gather our courage like mats,
stand slowly, and remember
how to breathe in public.

Old Paints, New Hands

The studio smells of rain and glycerin:
memory’s twin solvents. I haven’t painted in years,
yet my hands recall the grammar of pigment:
how to pinch a bristle, how to forgive a blotch.

Once, color felt like revelation.
I knelt before tubes as others kneel at altars,
squeezing out small suns and moons.
Now the palettes hold fingerprints
from other lives: a child’s thumb in red,
a note in the margin reminding me
to water the plant.

I mix a blue that is neither ocean nor sky
but the sorrow between them.
A young voice asks, “Teach me?”,
and the brushes rise like animals waking.

She paints a house refusing symmetry,
a dog with opinions, a brazen pink moon.
I show her how to name colors boldly,
how to sign her work like a vow.

When we finish, the canvases glow:
old pigments learning new songs,
new hands learning the old ones.
We hang two by the window: one memory,
one invention. The light blesses both.

Passageway of One Lightbulb

The hallway keeps every footstep like pennies
in a jar beneath its boards. Tonight, I walk it slowly,
hand grazing wallpaper that remembers
more stories than the family does.

A lone bulb hums its tired sermon:
a small yellow moon slung in the spine of the house.
Shadows lean against walls like old friends,
comfortable in their worn absurdity.

A closet breathes in the third room;
someone in the fifth snores Morse for lost loves.
The bulb tosses a secret at each door:
Tell me what you’ve never told daylight.

A picture frame hangs crooked.
I straighten it, and the photograph rights itself:
two strangers at a carnival holding a prize fish
that looks improbably joyous.

At the hall’s end a half-open door
pours darker night onto my feet.
Outside, the moon applauds the grass;
a cat negotiates with a fence post.

When I return, the bulb buzzes: pleased.
It has kept vigil through a thousand confessions.
I slip a note under the third door:
Thank you for holding the dark.
The house folds it into its ribs.