tutor, poet, teacher • in the Boston area

My writing comes from my personal and professional experiences, as well as observations in the physical and social world around me. I experience writing as seeing and discovery, as exploration and craft.

Publications:

My chapbook, The Possibility of Scorpions, won the White Eagle Coffee Store Press 2009 Chapbook Contest. My manuscript, Verge, has finally taken flight in the hope of landing on the right publisher’s desk.

My poems have been published in magazines such as Connecticut River Review, Ibbetson Street, Northern New England Review, Off the Coast, Poet Lore, Mayo Review, Prairie Schooner, Valparaiso, Mainstreet Rag, and Constellations, among others. “The Women” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Sample poems:

 

War Zone, Rwanda

In a field of bodies, a toddler sits,
his hand on his mother’s head
the other on her shoulder,

tears river his cheeks, cling
as he does to her,

he calls her to wake,
to feed, hold him, there
eclipsed in the rubble
of life’s breaking.

Bulldozers will shovel
the emptied bodies

into a mass grave to lie
nameless as when
they were all mere seeds.

Mayo Review

 

The Old Man’s Step

We march in the June heat of Mississippi,
step around spots of tar on the road grown

gum-soft, my feet ache from days of walking.
For a rest I sit in the shade of a store’s porch,

on worn uneven boards where it isn’t loose,
and I swig a Coke from a sweating bottle.

An old man steps before me, black
as can be, his veined hands, labor-leathered,

hang by his side, his face deeply creased.
He is somber, stern, eyes bore into me.

Miss, ya’ll gotta know thing’s worse fer us when
ya’ll leave, and even though I am a white girl

from Brooklyn doing right, read the papers,
know the stories, believe in showing up

to help swell the ranks — before him I am
speechless, without well-meant words

of patience, or even of apology.

Pudding Magazine

 

Attic

It is a museum of disuse, we find
keys, open trunks untouched
for years. Top hats for my brother.
For me, the brittle dresses

with hand-sewn seams, velvet ribbon,
lace, rows of tiny turned button holes
for silk knots. Were they Grandma’s?
The dress I try on is too long on me.

It is a house of dust and clutter—
our father’s siblings, all but one
still at home. Grandma complains
about our mother’s cooking, and says

she should wear a nightgown. She
makes my brother and me eat
our peas. I throw them up on the table.
Sometimes I rummage in her button

box, wood ones taken from BVDs. She threaded
together white ones from frayed shirts
now in the rag-bag. I sort them. Too many.
If we ask, she recites Paul Revere’s Ride.

Sometimes she closes her bathroom door
bangs and bangs an enamel cup
on the sink. Her cotton stockings
twist and wrinkle at her tiny ankles.

If only she had as many stories as
buttons. We are too young to search
for what else might be in her.
Our mother tells us Grandma
doesn’t have all her marbles.

We don’t know what weight
those words carry, we understand
only our mother’s trapped urgency,
the house’s fury.

 

My Brother’s Feast

For us he makes zuppa de pesce,
sauce simmers, draws the cousins
from upstairs to touch ribbons of pasta
hanging, still moist. He begins on the fish,
his swollen hands scrubs clams, mussels,
cuts the squid, its tentacles left whole.

He is all smiles even when it takes two tries
to pick bits of onion skin that stick like damp
paper to the cutting board—
I ask what is in the sauce that will fill us,
his alchemy of lone ingredients,

He says red stuff (tomato or even ketchup),
garlic, hot stuff (Tabasco, hot pepper),
acid stuff (vinegar, lemon), honey
or molasses, garlic again, maybe salt,
sometimes onion (sometimes pureed),
oil, maybe herbs. Still smiling. This
is his canvas. His love. His gift.

As we pass bread, wine, and eat,
he sits with us, takes his next bag
of milky sustenance, attaches one end
to the IV pole, the other to the port
implanted near his shoulder. Starts
the pump that will go all night.
No plate before him.

Off the Coast