Red Lights Featured PoetIn 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. +
I am awake tonight
not because of a bright moon or lovesickness, but mere insomnia—and you, you would not care the reason
Brevities #8, October 2003
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warm summer night— our first kiss lingers long enough for the lighthouse beam to flash again
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she tells me I could reveal our pregnancy to friends with a poem— I tell her I’ve already been writing them
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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
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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
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the leaf gone but the imprint remains— my heart as hard as this concrete after your suicide
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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
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