"On the Occasion of an Outfielder's Wedding" in Nimrod International Journal

On the Occasion of an Outfielder’s Wedding

~My great-grandparents, Frances and Patrick (Cozy) Dolan married on August 24, 1902 between games at a double-header played by Chicago and Brooklyn.

Frances was all that mattered.

Her eyes clear as Lake Michigan,

set off against the white lace

dress and hat. She removed her calfskin glove,

with little tugs at the fingertips, exposing

her firm left hand. He palmed it

like a baseball, slipping on the slender gold ring.

The ump looked almost church official

without his pads and faceguard.

He’d finger combed his hair into place, dusted

his pant legs. Cozy’d done the same, knowing

when he first courted Frances, he’d caught

a long fly ball that was destined for the fence.

Now, on the pitcher’s mound, clouds

shifting across the sky, surrounded

by her family, his teammates, the opposing team

(who’d shown up badly in the first game)

and fans waving pennants,

he leaned in to kiss his bride.

The crowd cheered, tossed straw boaters,

as he escorted Frances back to the stands.

Ump strapped on his pads, catcher too.

Cozy picked up his glove, nearly skipped

to the outfield where he could just

make out his wife’s profile,

her graceful neck.

"Cresting Bone" in Yemassee

Cresting Bone

I know a guy with no hat, no mittens who lives in the arctic and keeps icicles in his big stainless-steel cooler. I asked him to store the whalebone I found for safekeeping. I tripped over it when out for a walk in the summer. The frozen tundra softening to reveal this arc of bone, grey, fraying. Kill the light you say, and I don’t say Kill the moon that illuminates your face when it is full or blue or super or just mooning you now that you are here with your shoes on and ready to scramble down the rocks to where the blue herons stand on one leg or the other. Their footing sure, not lost like mine when I yanked both whalebone and gun from the muddy tundra. Gun that killed the whale perhaps. Its chamber still heavy with two bullets. One for each hour that disappears into the horizon. Night lengthens like my hair, we all grow long and tired. Even the tides slow their constant motion to scrub the earth clean. There is an infinite line in time that artists dream about when they sleep under a super blue moon. Some days winter slips in overnight like an iceberg that’s drifted to moor here in my front yard. I can walk out the door, across the porch and directly onto it. My bare feet remembering winter. Ice like sandpaper rubbing a burn across my soles. The guy with no hat and mittens knows this cresting bone.

"It Now Being Wednesday" in Paris Lit Up

It Now Being Wednesday

At dawn, where the river coiled and then forked.

I ran, as rubber boats with blue lights

dab the grey 

and police in wetsuits slip

like seals into the Seine.

Perhaps a woman, awake

to quiet her baby, glimpsed

a shadow falling.

Perhaps a night club owner returning home

spotted a billowing brown coat

just below the surface.

Perhaps after the holidays

had come and finally gone

and she didn’t turn up for work as usual,

the woman who shared the same desk,

worried. It now being Wednesday.

The police were rung.

A note found in her flat,

folded neatly with clear instructions

on where to find her body.

The body she left behind this morning

now surfacing in the embrace

of amphibian arms,

heavy like a child who’s fallen asleep

being carried to bed by her father,

who will kiss her damp forehead,

turn off the light.

"In the Diseased Light" & "Then I Slept" in Bracken →

In the Diseased Light

by Heidi Seaborn

All day the news darkening.
I imagine walking into a gleaming store—
We create a border, batten
the windows, latch the doors.

In this languid time inside of ourselves,
days drip like candlewax and all we want is
an arrow of birds. Instead we hang
like a lightbulb, necessary, without glamour.

We keep watch for orcas,
for messages—bottled and buoyant.
Dark data pools overnight into lakes then flows
while we wash our hands of everything.

The street scrubbed clean. No man with his dog,
no wailing toddler kicking against her mother,
or kids crouched down smoking pot, or flinging
a frisbee.

In the diseased light of evening, we quiet the murmurs
with alcohol. I feel our ragged edges. You unbutton
my blouse. Flesh is a soft word. I let it spread down
my tongue. Will we learn a new vocabulary, alone
in our home, the world still outside, ticking quietly?

Then I Slept

by Heidi Seaborn

First there was the lemon peel
of morning. Then the empty space

in the bed, still warm, my love’s body
remembered in the slight indentation.

Then the clatter of oatmeal and tea
and beyond that a neighbor’s whistle

for their dog, a dog’s deep throated
bark, a man calling out as a car door slams.

I have slept in, slept through a night

like every night as chaos presses
its ugly face against our windows

Yet, I slept without Ambien’s dark
fist pressing my pillow. Slept all night.

And then the next. The deep basin
of my mind filling with dreams

arriving now after all I have
lived through. My love questions

God’s existence, but I hear the weather
is warming this week. Our plum tree’s

tufted in white blossoms, daphne
& hyacinth perfume through an open

window and a hummingbird dips
and whirs over the forsythia,

In the stacked white boxes
up the hill, the honeybees doze.

"RESOLUTION" An Erasure by the Senate of the Articles of Impeachment in Poets Reading the News

"This America's Life" in The New Guard VIII, finalist for the Knightville Poetry Prize 2018

This America’s Life

America grew up white in the suburbs, a cul-de-sac 

playground where she took her training wheels off 

& disappeared down the sidewalk. Returning when 

mother’s chicken noodle casserole slid out the oven.

She woke up in the city after a night bothered by heat,

hollers, screech & rumble of garbage & delivery trucks. 

She yawned, stretched her arms up town to her bank job.

Plumped her breasts for the handsome branch manager. 

When her belly ballooned with her first, she quit &

moved with Sam to a colonial in the suburbs. America

would lie in bed, wait Sam’s departure. She’d listen

to Elvis on the radio, her hand curving around her unborn

child to wrestle her clit. Today, when she came, her body

rocked & muscled that baby out into America, 1958.

America walked her children to school then caught the train

into the city. Smoke stiffened the air, her eyes teared up

like her daughter’s from the bubble bath & America knew 

to blend her body into this movement even as it screamed 

& hurled across country. When she heard gunfire’s crack,

America raised a hand to guard her little ones, packed

them in the station wagon & drove to Memphis. Joined

the parade of mourners stretching down the Mississippi.

Southern hospitality hung from weeping willows,

reminding her to roll up her windows, keep out

the skeeters. At a diner somewhere in Louisiana, she

borrowed a dime, called Sam to say “don’t expect dinner,

don’t expect much, except to vote one lie after another.”

She cranked Janice Joplin, drove across America, 1968.

America went back to work once her kids left the house,

wearing a silk bow-tie blouse & no wedding ring. 

Girls all around her walked on high ideals & heels 

& spread their legs from one coast to the other—

but worked for real money. America woke up 

to an alarm that yawned across the middle class

as factories cleaned up their act, you could sense 

it in the air & the water—how it flowed upstream. 

Cash floating past rural towns, cities, ebbing

into DC before washing down Wall Street.

America’s daughter took the pill, took lovers,

squeezed into short skirts & discos to dance

 “black” & snort white—because that’s what

the cool white girls did in America, 1978.

America jazzercised like Jane Fonda in her teal

leotard & hot pink leg warmers to Frank singing

NYNY & Madonna’s Like a Virgin. She grew strong

& the men all around her grew weak. It was Good 

Morning in America when she kissed her cubemate 

goodbye for good one morning & sons stopped 

rising all over the country. On TV, she watched

astronauts disappear into a hole in the ozone. 

A flash, then ashes washed up with Castro’s refugees 

on the Florida beach where her daughter married

a Cuban man & Sam refused to give the bride away

to a “spic just off the boat.” Sam grown lardo 

on tax cuts big as a Texas steak. America lived

on Prozac to survive her 9-5 in America, 1988.

America moved to California like everyone—

lifted her face, breasts & struck a deal with age

to find work, a lover. She found a city in flames,

hot white tempers, scorched black streets cleaved

by a fault line that ran like OJ up the 405. Helicopters

buzzed her neighborhood & the brain of her son who

returned from the Gulf War for telling what no one

could ask. When he told his Dad, Sam rustled up

a new wife, kids, installed them in a mansion, big

like the houses America cleaned for Hollywood stars

who wanted a maid who spoke English & too old

to tempt husbands with tentacled hands. Evenings,

she searched the Internet for love, a cyber

constellation of beating hearts in America, 1998.

America kissed the new millennium a big hello

as she straddled her dotcom lover. His dick—

a joystick for forgetting grey hair or the blue

hairs of Florida standing by a stolen election.

Watching the towers fall & fall & fall on CNN,

she slipped back in time to when bombs fell 

on Pearl Harbor & she’d heard FDR proclaim

war on the radio. His voice commanding

like God’s. Not this reed thin tenor urging

eye for eye. When Katrina cast her eye

on New Orleans, America wept a flood 

of tears & kept crying as a bank too big to fail 

foreclosed her house, life savings—until she fell

in love with a black man in America, 2008.

America’s son did too—& he married him 

at City Hall 60 years after her wedding to Sam. 

She witnessed it with her daughter, son-in-law 

& grandchildren who glanced up from their iPhones 

in time to Instagram the grooms’ kiss. Sam missed it.

He’d gotten rich in the bailout & angry at rag-head

terrorists he imagined were torching his country like 

wildfires. While America protested yet another police 

killing of an unarmed black boy, Sam walled off

his González grandchildren picked up his gun

& voted America Great Again. America has grown

tired and older now. But #shetoo marched pussy-hatted, 

holding granddaughter Emma’s hand, together

dreaming of an alternative reality for America, 2018.

Excerpts from "I'm in Conversation with the Sea" & "Dia de los Muertos"

I’m in Conversation with the Sea

“I hold loss in my mouth, 

taste salt in my saliva.

This you understand. But do you 

know pain barnacle sharp? Do you 

know how ovaries die like oysters? “

Dia de los Muertos

~Honoring our Fathers in Oaxaca, Mexico

Here saguaro cacti flower.

Fuchsia-winged dragonflies simmer 

in Dutchman’s pipe vine,

until the night air 

folds the magenta blossoms

like hands around a heart.”

“When night closes its painted lid,

ravens darken roofs like tar paper.

Dog howls kite through the dark.

A black witch moth brushes 

dusty omens across our bedroom wall.”

For the full poems, please buy december

"Housework" in Tar River Poetry