After the Election, Reading with Students 

Between what is and what will come,

we read Ajax aloud--the old, dazed,

blood-spattered grief, the shame lit

in a day’s new light. A young man,

blinking through his glasses, shapes

the wail a hero makes when he learns

what madness and a deity have wrought

in his riven home. The light of a warm

November fills the classroom. Windows

frame red and gold leaves on half-bare

oaks. Again, Tecmessa covers the body.

Again, a brother demands funeral rites,

a grave, some way to restore

one sundered in a shattered land.

​

(featured in Crab Creek Review)

​

Bats Where I Worked
 

When the bats came through their end

of St. Francis Home, where one boy

playing an endless game of eight ball

raised a cue before I could speak

and plucked the bat from the air,

he turned a quick, nearly invisible thing

into a falling towel, into a small mophead

dropping from a hook with a dull thud,

into a folded leathery lump to be scooped

with a dustpan into whatever can was close.  

The game might be going on still,

rack by rack, unless he finally snapped and lifted

a cue ball right into the face of some

later, meaner version of me. Or the boy

might have sunk into his own hollow chest

and been lowered, maybe with taps and flag,

maybe in a cheap box with no one at all

standing sadly by, and his last thoughts

--as thought arcs backward toward a ground--

might have leapt to a gray, falling form.

​

(featured in The Louisville Review)