Dead Phone, Full Moons

a year of poems and possibilities

Dec 28, 2025

December was a book launch, and my friend and dear illustrator was asleep before I could even tell her that the moon was as huge as ever. My publisher, carrying a collection of books from both Dennis an I, directed me to his car, where we were to unload and later walk west to a bar, which fit perfectly under the full moon. We celebrate with a glass of wine and six shrimp. I had snapped a photo of the sky and shared the image with my friend, using Jacob’s phone, as mine had died. Upon finishing my first out-of-state reading from my full-length book collection, I was given a check for three digits from the Executive Director of a Los Angeles poetry center.

This coming year, I promise to have some ideas.

On Film.

Two glasses of wine in. Reading the biographical and film criticism text Agnes Varda by Kelley Conway, growing an urge - a strong, inexplicable sense - to write sentences, though unsure of their trajectory or purpose. We watched the film Le Bonheur/Happiness (1965). Gorgeous shots of a cruel summer, decadent flowers, labor with their hands, a small apartment, and the unremarkable day-to-day life of love and deceit and complacency. I loved the film, its terror slow and partially unrealized.

On Language.

Nua, a word meaning “new” and from the uir “fresh” in Irish (from Proto-Celtic nowiyos), but also appears in other contexts like the Vietnamese term for “wife and children,” a Singaporean slang for “soft/rotten,” or related to the Irish mythological king Nuada Airgetlám. New, fresh, rotten, and soft-like in its inspiration erodes and cracks within me.

On Sleep.

In a city much like Albuquerque, but it was actually Cleveland. I was exhausted, roaming a very hot landscape to find my fiancé, who was with his family. I scoured the plains and its desert shopping malls, and found myself distracted yet awed by the many expensive trinkets in the display cases of nearby shopping centers. My phone was dead, and I had no one to call and no charger. I walked in a shopping mall, which led to a very tall floor that, upon exiting, was a mountain. I slipped and was falling, very scared that I might die now, until a former classmate saw me and showed me how to stop the fall. Your feet must be pointed / now flip to your side. I try not to seem scared or anxious, worried that my feelings might affect my ability to transcend. I gain traction and hit a small notch in the hill, stopping my momentum. I pull myself by the arms, much like a pull-up, all the way back up. My classmate shows me the correct elevator that will lead me back down to the first floor. Inside the elevator was a man, creepy, and a young boy, annoying, pushing all the wrong buttons.

In another dream, I was swimming laps so fast that none of my high school classmates could catch me. It was prom night, and I did not wear makeup and wore a simple, yellow dress. I swim and swim and swim until I am the only one. My voice, when done, was out of breath, with everyone was half-noticing. Three women wait for me to finish so they may jump in. They complain of partnerships. I lean in. Yes? A woman looks at me: No woman wants to settle down these days. Women just don’t want to settle down these days. I don’t say anything. I flounder to get out of the pool.

My Fiction Drafts.

Large trees like Mossy Oaks and Sweetgums bordered the main streets as Man commuted from his car into a coffee shop, where people of all ages were bumping into each other under degrees of hurriedness and leisure, steam staring from the cafe machinery as smells of burnt coffee left remnants on his jacket, though this was no problem. The Man loved the smell of caffeine on his skin, proof he was here and not just anywhere, like work and home, then work again and home once more. The scent was evidence he went elsewhere, a third space just for him, the only memory beside a cortado cup he was even there. And then even that, when finished, was little proof.

The man worked in a tall, municipal building downtown. His office was fine, compact, and out of sight from the rest of his team, which he did not mind. The work was often slow this time of year. His cubicle, white and glassed like a fish bowl, was labeled with his name. On the door hung an adjustable clock that indicated whether he was in a meeting. He had no assistant, preferring to handle small administrative tasks himself.

The same morning, another man of similar height arose from his bed in such late fashion and stumbled upon his porch embossed in smoken ash, a slice of unfinished cake, a plate, and five lighters. His daily work was remote, on an island of his own - the kitchen - to which must be blurred on video so his client may not see the disarray his birthday party had left.

My Poems

Prayer in Job Loss

To beg for mercy.

So I want to be in

the zone, run 15

miles, eat a snow

cone, balk at dogs,

change my face.

Bad Beds

The best part was joy, to which

he had none. Once, for a panel

on poets in translation, a lecturer asked him,

Will you read in Gaeilge? He had four glasses of wine before reading,

I am a man, or I am a rock.

Phrases to make writing plausible.

He wrote poems in his head

before bed, yoga. Cold sweat

through the night, holding tight to,

mine a spine bending, hot iron

steaming up towards the place of fiction

and porcelain, hands that fail and stop.

Misery loves a hot bed to melt.

Originally in Bog Bodies Press, Issue 008.

Grift, Shovel, Identify

I was an impenetrable system

of canals. I was a lawless romantic

in de-escalation. I was a phantom

boom disseminating matter from

Midwestern plumbing systems

under a deep, sleek, sneatcha.

I saw it, mid-city queerness

lár na cathrach aisteach,

as it was bubbling up from

nothing, o cuinne to corner.

Originally in Discount Guillotine, 2025.

Twenty Years the Body

A clasp of a finger. The cyst an absence of smooth veins. A sky is the bandit, a sea urchin of filth. Meanings to survival in the trench of my mouth. If anyone loves, let it be from me in all directions. If anyone laughs, let it be my mother, from all directions. When I was a tiny girl, I was actually a grown man, running in all directions. In twenty years, if anyone dies, no they won’t. In twenty years, it’ll be more of us, against the pipes. In twenty years, the web of it all will be encumbered, but not encumbered. We will be surrounded by small fleets of friends and big boots. I don’t want to be afraid of anything, and I plan to despise even less.

Yeats’ Coat

In which he made

by the mythology of

heel throat slog and soot,

wrapped up in song

where they sang it &

left its threads ragged and wet.

No one’s going to wear it now,

he writes. For there’s more

to prison than nakedness,

more to dying than dying

lying down. Plus, you’ve

got to love the world,

as cold as it is.

Originally in Pretty Punks: 2025 (Magra Books)

Runner

I go back to cataloging artists’ closets.

It involved self imposed nosiness, redirection. Everyone has that stupid thing they won’t get rid of & it’s nice to make sense of all the baggage.

I pray our kiss looks real when they take our photo, light trickling into film frames on the bad practices of preservation. We later see the image in surprise and think of ourselves like objects, too, thumbing the print in its dust ridden fodder as bookmark.

Oh yes there it is, slightly pathetic just as it is wishful, just as work once was too.

A thousand negatives of us shining in the gutter.

Originally in Bog Bodies Press (Fall 2025)

Unexpected

To my boss, who just laid me off:

Just as I married

a young writer,

his propose/ing

in a wintering

sleet, befuddling

the door way

when I would