Burning Questions
I once knew a girl who had the imprint of a hand burned into her shoulder. It was her brother’s hand.
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Poetry
Poems shaped by the emotional register of experience—by place, memory, history, and the shifting edge of the sea.
Corresponding with the Dead
Some people believe spirits encircle us, carrying grievances, haunting places once loved, loathe to leave. The sudden cold spot in that room—you felt it:
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Finest Kind
They call themselves finest kind, the fishermen: many from families that came across from the Azores generations ago. Names like Silva, Cabral, Dutra, Sousa, who came to embrace a hard life of long cold journeys, days and nights filled with wind and water and work.
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Horizons Unknown
And now I remember how unfair it seemed, Theseus abandoning Ariadne on Naxos, simply because she was no longer useful to him—
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Hiraeth
You said you were going home. It’s a truism: no one ever can. Home is not a place— it’s a time, a memory, an impression the scent of lilac tumbling over stone walls
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Learning to Fly
The woman who taught me to write poetry lived for a brief butterfly moment in my seaside town. She wrote words I remembered in the night, her images
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Nature is Not Amused
Someone said to me, your poems are so dark— Write about nature instead. But it’s autumn now, and fall reminds us, in our bodies, in our bones, that we’re not doing this right: We’re not
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The Threshold of Night
Compline starts with stillness. Silence. Candlelight flickering. Shadows dancing on ancient talismans: wait for it—
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Boat Tours to Watch Gaza Burn
I heard they were taking boat tours to watch Gaza burn, checking out the real estate, waiting for the moment when they can occupy the few homes still left standing.
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Vukovar
I live in a place With too many dead heroes And not enough present joy. How did you write about my city under siege?
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Losing My Religion
Candles burning before dawn. Prayers and incense rising like early dough in the convent kitchen: nearness to eternity, transcendence, grace. This
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A Lay of Long Defeat
I sing a lay of long defeat, the end of a lifetime, the pause before something else begins. Is there nobility in lost battle, lost land, lost beliefs?
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In This Night of Grace
Candlelight flickering on weathered stone, centuries of silence gathered for this one night, this sacred night, this night of grace.
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On the Borderline
Ancient cartographers knew the danger of living on the edge: they warned of dragons beyond. Submerged, invisible, waiting for the unwary step, the bold enterprise, waiting
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Fire Breathing
Birds dropping out of the sky: burning, and dropping out of the sky. Stars gone, sun gone, nothing but thick darkness and fear: ghosts wander dangerously in the smoke.
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The Ninth Floor
They’d locked all the doors— To make sure there were no thefts. To make sure no one left their work. To make sure the union stayed out. To make sure they made the most money:
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Taliban Girl
Yesterday, she lost her voice (it had long been quieted, but they made it official: women cannot sing in the streets, in public, anywhere under the male gaze) because
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Confession
Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been one year since my last confession. One year since I could speak without sins on sins, death on death, pain and dark nights and bless me, Father.
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The Edge Is Not the End
And finally she went through a wall of fire. (I call her she, but in truth we are speaking of a tiny machine built by hand and conversing in archaic Assembly language; it's that fragility and strength which make me choose to see her as female.) Almost fifty years ago she traveled past the planetary giants she was tasked to document, sending home her tourist photos, her traveler’s impressions of foreign worlds. But she wasn’t finished…
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The Dead Wife Among the Fairies
A lighthouse keeper’s wife died, and in his grief he visited a witch who taught him to summon his wifefrom the Otherworld, snatching her back from the fairies. The trick worked, and thereafter every month on the full moon he summoned his dead wife to be with him again for that one night. No one, of course, asked the wife if she wished to return.
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