new poems
from “A Spell for Becoming Lace”
Hurricane Harvey, Houston
. . .Monday, August 28, it rains. The street is a river
that flows to stone steps, then wrought iron railing, porch,
seeps into floors, walls, rises and rises. The water enters you,
is trapped in your shiplap walls. You have a choice:
You can dissolve, become the warp and mildew of wood, swollen sheetrock.
Or you can resist:
Imagine the ivory bobbin of bone lace. Let the water move through you
like mesh. Let the cordonnet be your scaffolding, each linen stitch
wrapped and buttonholed, locked, secured in place,
a porous stronghold delicate as home.
The River Styx, 2020
And for Bruno Schulz, shot and killed by Gestapo officer Karl Günther in 1942 while walking home through the Aryan quarter with a loaf of bread
May the world not die of bread
or a lost Messiah
or the oil smeared desert
or a fire washed sky
but ripen into childhood—
the heart’s crocodiles turned
cinnamon shops
and love
and love
The Texas Observer, 2025
“Migrations” first appeared in Odes and Elegies: Eco-poetry from the Texas Gulf Coast edited by Katherine Hoerth and Daniel Valdez (Lamar UP, 2020). In March 2024 the film above was produced by filmmakers Pamela Falkenburg & Jack Cochran (Outlier Moving Pictures) as one of five films in the initiative, Changing the World One Poem at a Time with four other Texas activist poets, Naomi Shihab Nye, Lupe Mendez, Aris Kian Brown, and J. Estanislao Lopez, for the Houston film festival, REEL Poetry. Warmest thanks to the Texas visual artist, Billy Hassell, for permission to include images of his paintings—”Butterflies Over the Rio Grande,” “Hummingbirds and Cholla,” and “Bordered Patch Butterflies.”