Poetry
"Unsolicited" has not been published by a literary magazine. "Immigration" originally appeared in Crack The Spine and "Isolation" originally appeared in Emerge Literary Journal under slightly altered forms:
Unsolicited
These letters shall never find
meaning / from words caged
between phrases / ruled by
grammar / severing idiom
from spirit / spliced / by cold
judges of the jury's courthouse
/ convicting matter into
subjects / defined behind
the panel of these pages /
stanzas / verses / lyrics
listed by numbers camped
in concentration / under
the author / title / table
of contents / bordering
the spine of this verdict
/ an overseer cracks the
whip / at words unworthy
of expression / in the room
where prejudice dictates yin
from yang / beyond a book
these letters found life / and
the other sentence / death.
Immigration
Losses leave vacuums
siphoning mind from matter
in cavities of foreign dreams
deferred to domestic dust....
nerves drawling alphabets--
new languages to learn,
reciting dead names
of unrecorded children
mirrored in classrooms
ad libbing native dialects
which roll off the tongue
like tramontane landslides--
jagged Alps that Balkanize
the mouth of an executive
who hides behind the profane
wall of an alien reflection.
Isolation
They found my father weeping
at a stranger’s doorstep.
He was searching for Piqua, Ohio,
only he was in Seattle, Washington.
I imagine the wrinkled lobes of his brain,
cracking into crystallized shards
that slide down his spinal cord
like memories of a melted glacier.
If only I could slip into his mind
and watch his Mount Saint Helen
flatten to snow-dusted crops of Ohio,
where he roams in search of her alone.
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