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
With thanks to guest editor, the poet Jennifer Franklin, for selecting my poems, “The Hidden Mother” and “Questions for Lee Miller,” for Issue 15 of the Lily Poetry Review published this spring! (Buy the issues here.)
Notes on the poems:
“Hidden Mother Photography”: See Susan E. Cook’s essay “Hidden Mothers: Forms of Absence in Victorian Photography and Fiction,” in Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, Southern New Hampshire University, Winter 2021.
“Questions for Lee Miller”: Lee Miller was one of a small number of female combat photographers traveling with Allied troops in WWII. Her photographs and reports appeared in Vogue between 1944 and 1945. She was among a group of soldiers from the 179th Regiment posted to Hitler’s apartment in Munich, and on April 30, 1945 she was one of the first to enter the newly liberated Dachau camp. Later that same day, as Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun took their own lives in an underground bunker in Berlin, Miller posed for Life photographer, David Scherman, as she bathed in Hitler’s bathtub.) See https://www.leemiller.co.uk/artists/lee-miller/ or https://www.farleyshouseandgallery.co.uk/people/lee-miller/.
“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.”
The poems on this page are included in a manuscript-in-progress tentatively titled The War that Will Come.