A video poem called “Wave”

I’ve been all about experimenting with the new, really easy-to-use, AI-enabled video editing tools to see how poems might come to life in new ways. Here, I stitched together some visuals (simple creative commons video clips from Unsplash) along with audio of me reciting my poem “Wave” to see what the tide might wash in. This poem is a reflection of my time spent in a red-brick rowhouse in Pittsburgh’s East end neighborhood Lawrenceville, where I spent my early twenties during graduate school. The house faced a more than hundred-year-old stone wall, the North edge of the Allegheny Cemetery, a gorgeous place filled with trees, birds, deer, you name it. “Wave” is a love poem to that home and the stories from within it. (Turn audio on. 🔉)

Poems about home in Aurora Poetry Anthology

The editors over at Aurora published a few of my poems in the print version of their spring 2022 poetry anthology. The first piece is a prose poem about home. The second is a bit of a melody about bodies, belonging, and – well – also home. Thank you, Aurora, for featuring my work. I’ve since renamed and updated my poem “Den” to “Artifact” and reformatted it in couplets as opposed to its original prose poem form.

Artifact

You rent a dinosaur of a backhoe

quarry the dead lawn from the earth for the both of us

Mechanical smells dew into air as you beep backward,

avoiding the fragile tilt of a fence that’s been painted over to hide decay, dirt

In sticky clunks of clay, milk glass marbles swirled with indigo and orange unearth,

proof of children that came before. Look closely; you’ll see the signatures of two sisters

whose names start with A etched into the cement near the front steps.

We hang potted plants from enameled chains so their vines descend from the sky to us,

keep a few found saint statues caked with mud, break the red brick of the planter bed beyond repair 

It must go for us to bind together (root), start fresh. As we all do when one lush life isn’t enough

As a newly mated coyote couple might search for and build upon a forgotten den,

we bank on the dormant promise of good bones; got enough time and energy to assemble them into a skeleton

that resembles a body (a home), until it’s a whole jingling thing again

Seams 

He hides behind my legs 

wanting to become smaller

as awkward stranger

stems toward him

seeks to graze 

flesh bounce

of his pillowy cheeks 

like she gets to

because she’s older

like she gets to 

because he doesn’t 

yet know better.  

I want to tell him 

he can

want to tell her

she can’t 

but don’t

because,

timing 

because,  

she’s my elder

assumedly 

at a loss for enough touch. 

He hooks his arms 

around the safe place

behind each of my knees, 

snuggles his face 

in between.

Unconvinced of her intentions, 

he stitches back 

into the fabric of me 

like he’s still a part of me 

me, convinced, 

like the makeup of myths,  

that he is.  

---

Snaps from the journal