I was born in Shanghai, China, the son of Holocaust survivors, and grew up in New York City. I now live in the booming metropolis of Saint Cloud, Minnesota, where there are a surprisingly large number of good, cheap, hole-in-the wall ethnic restaurants. Two of my three (soon to be four) grandchildren live in town, so I get to spend a good deal of time with them, playing tag, which is sort of like running wind sprints. For over thirty years I taught in the English department at Saint Cloud State University, where the kids from Lake Woebegon go to college, and I can attest to the fact that they all are, in fact, above average. Please take a look at these two chapbooks, which are available for download at the amazingly low price of nothing:  Blue Season (with poems by me and V-V regular Joseph Lisowski, and ​Return of the Bride of Frankenstein — click on the book titles.)
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The Poison Flower 

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burns your eyes, sends its wounded colors
through membranes and tears and blood,

flashes like bursting shells in starry night.
When you rub the fiery petals on your lips, a

moaning takes you far from home and your
soft bed fails.  Where is your broken mirror

now? How long have you dug your nails
in famished, familiar plots?  Have your 

fingers never released  vapors from some 
forgotten  weed? Where will it take root, 

in what channel of the sweet canal?  Coal 
dust stains our hands and in the lower 

branches small birds burn.  They sing 
like little stars, peppering the sky 

with light, a flickering your skin feels only 
in the mouth of some wild and lonely dream.

Originally published in California Poetry Review

Committee on Committees 

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You can’t make this stuff up. 
There’s a Committee on Committees. 
This is true. 
It meets alternate Wednesdays 
on a cloud anchored to the science 
building with cables braided 
of finely spun glass, stretching
taut as the cloud struggles 
to rise or catches a strong west wind 
straining to sail the river, ragged ship 
spitting wisps of its misty hull.  
Sometimes the hawsers shine 
in the sun or glisten in black rain,  
especially when they’ve been polished 
with a chamois by an old woman’s loving hands. 

Some days the cloud is black, 
some days white 
as lamb’s wool, but there are windy 
days when it turns the grey 
of your father’s eyes looking backwards 
down the trail to a meadow bursting 
with wildflowers:  
Devil’s Paintbrush and Queen Anne’s Lace. 
He seemed to be following some distant motion, 
maybe a glimpse of fur or a wing fluttering
through leaves.  
That’s the time you think of him 
laughing in the guestroom with your aunt or 
in the evening smoking his cigar, trailing ash.
There’s nothing of him left; your open hands are full of rain.  

Originally published in Flutter
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