Cherry Colored


The evening rises new 
and the wine yet unopened,
beckons like blue jays at dusk, 
calling mates to the nest 
after a rainstorm.

It’s warm enough to open 
the windows and listen.
Night’s branches stretch 
wide and create pathways 
to the moon.

A journey not yet taken, 
but dreamt about in books
and only beholden to the poet 
and the cherry-colored pour
of repose and leisure, 

from the cork to the cup,
from the intellect 
to the material, 
from the pen 
to its page.

-originally published by SLCC Community Writing Center in Pieced Into Treetops (a chapbook by Trish Hopkinson). 2013.


Sex and Light


Call them pleasures: 
running a warm bath,
a cup of cherries, 
a cup of wine, 
the pale blue light 
of the sun across the sky. 
Haunted by hedonism,
the freshness of sex,
the endless motion of self,
the hunger, the marveling,
the pulse that grabs us.
Mining the songs of night
in two directions to justify
our riposte in verse.

-a found poem from Anne Carson’s “Mimnermos and the Motions of Hedonism” published in her book Plainwater. 



The Day We Found a Meadow and Played Frisbee Buck Naked


Suddenly spontaneous,
the afternoon breathed life into us
like a hot air balloon on a summer horizon.

The campground buzzed 
with the return of early hikers
and the lunch dish clanks of late risers.

The creek cruised glittering
in sunbeams past the common meadow
by the big fire ring and the road beyond.

Something tugged at my skin,
cursed enclosures, longed for freedom
and urged my spirit to play unadorned.

Shedding the unneeded, 
we became nothing but flesh and flowers, 
laughing and stretching to catch the Frisbee.

-originally published by Kind of a Hurricane Press in their Petals in the Pan anthology. 2015.