Here are a few poems. These were selected as finalists in the 2007 Penumbra poetry contest. Consider this an early experiment with posting poetry here; this page is bound to change around a bit.

The Washstand

This is after I forgot to check the oil for months
and the engine locked up. The car, nothing
but a deserted anthill. Sleep is the tiger whose stripes
match perfectly the dry and cracking grass blades of the savannah.
This is after I threw the desk chair across our bedroom and watched,
terrified, as it bounced once

on the bed and spun—
in a direction seemingly
impossible by what few laws
of physics I know—

to land squarely and with a sound like broken ribs against the eggshell
door of the antique washstand you keep your tee shirts in.
The one that’s been in my family since the Civil War was an idea.
After the way you looked at me, like I was some animal, some primate
banging my head against my cage bars, I could only fall into the couch,
turn on the TV while you put the dogs to bed. The way the door hung,
dizzying and splintered, from the brass hinges that held it through
six generations, made me think of
(a southern belle in corset
and hoopskirt. Smiling in reflection. Water tickling her face
from a porcelain bowl).

The door lilted to the floor like a leaf, pressed for so long
between pages, finally exposed to the crushing air. The final thud
of this timeless heartbeat, not a war wound.

An accident.

All night, I’m blue from the glow of the TV while you sleep alone.
The washstand is already a fallen legend, tee shirts sliding,
spilling to the floor. But the desk chair is modern, infinite.

A Summer Day in February Without Ducks

This liminal moment—a day wedged
between the white weight of early winter
and the bitter face of March and April—
is golden. Yesterday, this spot was dead
with snow, but now: a picnic blanket,
a cooler of Cokes, sandwiches.

We eat tuna salad in the sun, only feet
from the frozen surface of the wintry
Chippewa Lake. The ducks are still
in Mexico somewhere not knowing that Ohio
has become Florida for one day in February.
Your kindergarten sister Rachael runs and laughs
fleetingly, as if she knows that
tomorrow
this will all be dead again. I’ll wake up
to an empty apartment and you’ll have left a note
taped to the bathroom sink, reminding me to vacuum,
do the dishes, pay the phone bill, clean the grout.
When you come home from work, I’ll be
delivering pizzas, and you’ll do the dishes I forgot.

After lunch we walk, hold hands,
sing “Rockaway Beach.” We stop
on the muddy dock where all the snowy runoff
has collected. Our feet numb against the cold planks,
but tomorrow, we’ll peel sunburned skin from our noses.
We’re not thinking about money or the car.

I walk off the end of the dock to show you
the lake’s ice-skin is thick enough to hold me,
but as I put weight on my heavy foot, there’s the sound
of ripping, the ice pulled apart around me
as if quartered by startled horses. I am plunged,
surprised and flailing, knee-deep and blue
into the icy shallows.

You save me, or I let you think you save me, and I lie
on the dock, smiling at the concave sky. I am thinking
of tomorrow when Rachael joins us from the playground.
She twirls a rogue dandelion and whispers inches
from my ear, in reference to the concave sky:

“Look up there—you’ll never let a balloon go again.”