Red Lights Featured Poet

In January of 2007, I was the featured in Pamela Miller Ness’s tanka journal Red Lights. The following poems were showcased, including my sequence, “The Second Eye.” Poems not otherwise acknowledged were first published in Red Lights 3:1, January 2007.         +

 

not because of a bright moon

or lovesickness,

but mere insomnia—and you,

you would not care the reason

 

        Brevities #8, October 2003

 

        ~   ~   ~

 

warm summer night—

our first kiss

lingers long enough

for the lighthouse beam

to flash again

 

        ~   ~   ~

 

she tells me

I could reveal our pregnancy

to friends with a poem—

I tell her I’ve already

been writing them

 

        ~   ~   ~

 

The Second Eye: Five Tanka

 

our wrinkled newborn

sleeping in my arms—

how lucky is the sun

to have dawned

this very day

 

home from the hospital—

what are the chances

for the baby’s first drive

that all the lights

would be green?

 

grandparents arriving

from another country—

in the name-the-baby book

a four-leaf clover

marks his page

 

another feeding—

again we count

his fingers and toes

and they’re all

still there

 

the baby asleep

beside the Daruma doll—

tomorrow

we’ll paint

its second eye

 

she adjusts my blanket,

concerned that I not be cold,

and I scold her for waking me up—

the hurt look on her dark face

haunts me beyond morning

 

        Rivet #13, June 2005

 

        ~   ~   ~

 

April comes

and now you are gone,

you, who told your guardian angel

each year on your birthday,

not yet

 

        For Pat Shelley

        Hummingbird 9:3, March 1999

 

        ~   ~   ~

 

the leaf gone

but the imprint remains—

my heart as hard

as this concrete

after your suicide

 

        ~   ~   ~

 

I am at your door, knocking—

as I turn away

in a gathering rain

I wonder if you stand at my door,

knocking, knocking

 

        Poetry Kanto (Japan) #17, September 2001