Poetry Samples

Click here for audio samples of me reading my poems.

Wonder Woman Dreams of the Amazon
(Published in American Poetry Journal, Spring 2005 and featured on
Verse Daily, March 1, 2005. Also included in the Pudding House chapbook,
Female Comic Book Superheroes, and nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2005.)

I miss the tropes of Paradise - green vines
roped around wrists, jasmine coronets,
the improbable misty clothing of my tribe.

I dream of the land of my birth. They named
me after their patron Goddess.
I was to be a warrior for their kind.

I miss my mother, Hippolyta.
In my dreams she wraps me tightly
again in the American flag,

warning me, “Cling to your bracelets,
your magic lasso. Don't be a fool for men.”
She's always lecturing me, telling me

not to leave her. Sometimes she changes
into a doe, and I see my father
shooting her, her blood. Sometimes,

in these dreams, it is me who shoots her.
My daily transformation
from prim kitten-bowed suit to bustier

with red-white-and-blue stars
is less complicated. The invisible jet
makes for clean escapes.

The animals are my spies and allies;
inexplicably, snow-feathered doves
appear in my hands. I capture Nazis

and Martians with boomerang grace.
When I turn and turn, the music plays louder,
the glow around me burns white-hot,

I become everything I was born to be,
the dreams of the mother,
the threat of the father.

Hear me read Wonder Woman Dreams of the Amazon.

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Breathing in the Asthma Capital (Published in 88, Issue 4, October 2004)

In Knoxville two miles from Oak Ridge
I grew up with a yard of lilacs

despite stray dogs, stray cars jackknifed into lawns

the lilacs press their tiny mouths
cool and faded
to my fingertips

despite crushed cigarettes and smells of tar

lilac branches climb uncertain
above asparagus, moss, strawberry leaves
they rise like watery flames out of red clay

despite seasons of radioactive snow

despite spring shedding its wreckage
on rotting house frames, gravel roads
on overturned crates of mangoes on I-75

the lilacs go on burning
radiant
and thick against a grey May sky.

Hear me read Breathing in the Asthma Capital.

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The Villainess (Published in The Adirondack Review, Spring 2003)

resembles your mother, at least around the eyes –
treacherous, limpid and seal-like.
Inevitably handsome as a lioness, she
commands ranks, smokes cigarettes,
wears fur, has sex without apologizing.
Sometimes, she looks just like you,
but with crow’s feet, more tattoos and better lingerie.

She conjures dragons or viruses,
she can lie easily to police or to you.
And you must love her, though she betrays you in a heartbeat -
you keep accepting the poisoned comb, the spinning wheel,
with open, pale hands.

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My Little Brother, In Parts (Published in Can We Have Our Ball Back, Issue 14)

Part 1: Assassins

At thirteen, my brother
dreams of becoming a paid assassin.
He mimics violence – tries a roundhouse kick,
barely missing my head, slices an imagined machete,
his lips puckered to exhale explosions.
He sleeps with knives under his pillow.
His eyes remain trained on his computer,
even as we have a conversation.
I watch his little character somersault,
shoot at menacing aliens. “Here, try” he says,
I squeeze the trigger button once, again,
aiming the lasers with terrifying ease,
splattering green extraterrestrial goo
over the buzzing electronic landscape.

Part II - Chinese Stars

My brother was caught on the bus today
With Chinese stars, little metal disks with cunning grooves
designed to catch in flesh.
He carries them in the inside pockets of his jacket and pants.
He brags he’s gotten them through airport customs twice.
Now I have to drive him to school.
He offers to show me how to throw them.
My brother puts the jagged circle in my hand, showing me
how to hold them so I don’t cut myself,
and moves my elbow – the motion’s just like fly-fishing,
graceful and clean. The campy red dragon
is smiling from the face of the star, jaws deep in maple bark.

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Amazon Women on the Moon
(Published in Female Comic Book Superheroes (Pudding House Press) and Becoming the Villainess (Steel Toe Books).)

In the green, green light
we wait for you, entangled in silver
nightclothes and our long white hair.
We know you are coming.
Our songs travel through the air to you,
like clouds of radiant dust indifferent to gravity.

You, you race from your spaceship,
helmet under arm, confident
you will win over our queen.
(She is the one in thigh-high pleather boots,
a sign of royalty.)

Without question we feed you
and your crew. We repair your pathetic
engine with our glamour, our technologies.
We offer you a glass of something foaming, neon,
but you wave it away laughing,
and ask instead for a kiss.

There is nothing you can give us in return,
we know that already. You’ve forgotten
your shoes and your ray gun. We know soon
you will board your broken ship,
leave us alone, as usual,
terrible and glowing in our lunar skins
to sing brilliantly to an eclipsed blue earth.

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Alice in Darkness (Published in Becoming the Villainess)

Forget tears. Chasing
white animals with timepieces
in this drug-trip landscape
can only lead to more of same.
Hedgehogs, playing cards, paintbrushes:
full of undisclosed danger.
Didn’t your mother tell you
not to kiss strangers?
That Cheshire smile shouldn’t fool you.
Pull your skirt down.
Your nails are growing so fast
you’re hardly human.
Alice, fight your version of Bedlam
as long as you can.
Sleep the sweet dream away
from that gooey looking glass, or mushrooms,
or the fear of your own body.
Forget what the night tastes like.
Stop wondering through the shadows,
holding your neck out
for the slice of the axe.
 

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The Taste of Rust in August (Published in Pontoon 7, 2004)

Knoxville afternoons in summer, lightning on the air.
The horses whinny, nervous; the chickens roost.

Our chain-link fence is rusty. I like to taste it –
that metallic clean I imagine to be the flavor

of lightning. My brother was hit once, carrying
a metal bucket to water the animals. It burned

his arm, and left a funny taste in his mouth.
Mother says I have always sucked on spoons,

licked lampposts, iron grates, jewelry.
She goes crazy about the germs.

She says I do it because of what she calls iron-poor blood
and it’s true – there’s no rust in my skin at all,

dull and transparent as wax paper.
I run around the yard for hours, chasing the lightning,

tracing those fractal lines in the sky with my fingers
as the smell of ozone drives the dogs crazy.

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