Poem of the Month

I like it when we shop together. All of us
at the heart of a snakeskin wallet.                   Grocery-bag ghosts
graze on footfalls. A wallet where we’re          kept
like photobooth shots. There was a man

I learned the secret of serenity
by waterboarding daffodils.
My Buddha is landfill.
My mantra choked

There are things I want to show you, like the empty pause that encircles desire. Or how Klimt knew that a woman bends her neck that far for a kiss only if she really wants it. I want to show you how quiet it gets when you’re in the company of someone who no longer loves you.

Inside its surround
folded in, I’m a fold
of it, I’ve never left atmospheric
borders I engorge to the point of
enfolded

Again.
Another bloody body 
another child dying while

doing the unthinkable
eating food, going home,
eyes meeting impatient suspicion.

I would cut off my own thumb for the perfect thimbleful
of wood-ear mushroom and bamboo shoot soup.

My paychecks all go to heirloom parsnips and pickled lamb tongues.
I dream of singed pigs’ feet, pearly cartilage and crisp skin.

If I could go back to my birthplace,    Lanciano, wander all day up and down the corso, stop by the cathedral built on the ruins of a Roman prison and pray,                                              if I could

The Tundra at last
Resound my heart
Your music, the river
Your light, the stars
Your carpet, the lichen’s tender green

We Twitter, Tinder, Tumblr through eternity. Loquacious text messages flit from fingertips, waves of data ...

Like   noise   of the   pouring   river the mind  lets  go,   ...