I want to go home, my friend’s mother says,
over and over, even though this is the house
she’s lived in fifty-some years. Alzheimer’s, 
dementia; different patients, same story: 
they want to go home. I wish I could send them
to this house behind the blue trees, with its solid 
flattened space, bright primaries outlined in bold
strokes of cobalt. The rest of the colors run away
with themselves, the spectrum as playground. 
Wouldn’t we want to go there, too, return 
to childhood’s box of Crayolas, coloring the roof 
yellow if we felt like it; the sky sea-green with clouds 
swimming by like a school of fish. We could splash pink 
wherever we wanted, eat marshmallows for dinner,
give up our naps, yell oley oley in free 
as the shadows begin to twist and lengthen. . . .

-first published in Verse Wisconsin

It’s like being back in the womb, isn’t it, these walls of pink, 
this floor one rose shade deeper? I think about my middle 
daughter, five months pregnant. Her baby‘s grown
from an orange seed to a green olive to a plum. Now
it’s the size of a boneless chicken breast. What is it 
about babies that makes us think of food? And what
is it about this color that makes us think of health?
Because we say in the pink when we’re feeling fine?
Because roses blush in different shades? Because some
kir drizzled in Champagne makes it royale? But

if you get a pink slip, you’ve been canned, and watch
out for those elephants on parade. No one aspires
to a pink collar job. And no girl wants a bunch
of carnations, smelling of cloves and maiden aunts. 
The sunset pinkens the sky in the west, and I’m 
tickled pink, thinking of you. Matisse’s studio glows,
suffused in light, the inside of a satin slipper. Pink
the edges of my heart, cut them into scallops, make
them whirly. Imagine strawberry ice cream, rhubarb
compote, candy hearts. This sweet, sweet world.


-finalist for the 2012 Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize
-published in Nimrod, 2012
-nominated for the 2012 Pushcart Prize

You might be looking at her globed breasts
or the round bread basket of her belly. Or the way
her curves repeat themselves in the lobed gold
borders of the wallpaper, the decorative motifs
in the rug on the floor. But my eye is drawn
to the foreground, four ripe lemons resting
in a blue bowl, the same shade of periwinkle 
on shutters and doors here in Auvillar, 
this village on the chemin de Campostelle.
You might have thought the blue was to honor the Virgin
or to ward off the evil eye, but no, it’s because there was paint 
leftover from the woad factories, and its use 
could reduce the growth of fungus and mold.
Which doesn’t mean it’s not the color of heaven.
Or that these oval lemons aren’t citron suns.
You can almost smell their oil on your hands, feel the yellow
curdle in your mouth. The roses on the wallpaper start to sing.


-first published in Journal of New Jersey Poets
-finalist for the 2014 New Jersey Poets Prize

Here, the banana peel road slips down
to the sea, and crazy trees undulate,
wave their red and blue branches. 
Shadows pool, electric eel blue. 
Look, a parrot has molted its feathers,
dropped them all over the ground.
So let’s boogaloo down this road
paved in sunlight. Let’s dance
the tango, and turn up the voltage.
Let’s commit an act of spontaneous
combustion. Let’s all go down
in flames.


-commissioned poem, The Houston Art Museum - published on their website

There is nothing here but wheat, no blade
too slight for his attention: long swaying
brush strokes, pale greens, slithery yellows,
the hopefulness of early spring. All grass
is flesh, says the prophet. Here, there are no
gorgeous azures stamped with almond blossoms,
no screaming sky clawed with crows, no sunflowers
roiling gold and orange, impasto thick as Midi sunlight.
His brush herringboned up each stalk, the elemental
concerns of sun, rain, dirt, while his scrim of pain receded
into the underpainting. He let the wind play
through the stems like a violin, turning the surface
liquid, a sea of green, shifting eddies and currents. 
No sky, no horizon; the world as wheat.


-first published in The Valparaiso Poetry Review