Category Archives: New York City

My “Positively Poetry Reading Series” performance for the Hoboken Public Library’s National Library Week!

Animals, Comedy, Death, Existence, Father, Happiness, Home, Humor, Japan, Life, Love, Marriage, Metaphor, metaphysics, Mourning, Nature, New York City, Night, Parenthood, philosophy, Poetry, Poets, Reincarnation, Sun, Tragedy, Travel, Trees, Winter, World, Writing

Yes, here are those promised cows, daffodils, and the absence of Holocaust poems:

You can almost smell that I-78 highway extension through the thin gloss of YouTube.

And here’s a friendly guide to jump straight to your favorite poems:

00:00 Introduction

01:02 The origin of life

02:28 A small dot appears.  A genesis.  A thing out of nothing

05:45 Thanks a lot, Shakespeare, for the Starling

07.46 Departing from Sengen Jinja

10:00 Naming Things

11:46 Why My Kid Sobs at the Ice Cream Parlor

14:18 Not a Holocaust Poem

15:53 Cows & Daffodils

17:58 Lakawa a Stat on

20:05 A Single Swallow Doesn’t Signal Spring

20:39 Animal House

22:09 A poem written in my past life as a 15th century Georgian monk

23:32 From Out of the Darkness

26:47 Beacons of Light

28:02 Post 11

29:17 Epilogue

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“Not for Sale,” shortlisted for the Times Literary Supplement’s 2019 Mick Imlah Poetry Prize

Fantasy, Metaphor, New York City, philosophy, Poetry, Poets, World, Writing

Mick Imlah Poetry Prize 2019 shortlist

Not for Sale

The minimum-wage worker drags the cart
full of children, all of them
so cute, put together
so perfectly. Along the cracks of the sidewalk,
the wheels twist, popping, the ride
far from smooth. Occasionally,
couples stop him, ask how much
for the little girl with pigtails, for the boy
with the black eye. The worker
doesn’t speak much English,
tells the passersby the kids aren’t for sale
until tomorrow, & only
at the store, not illegally
like this, smack in the middle of the street.