Augustine

What did he love
in those days but

his theft? Not for
their shape & taste,

but for the act
of plucking them

did he devour
those stolen pears,

sweetened by sin.
Itching with passions

in his sixteen year,
he would confess,

he was enamored
of error-error

itself, not what
he erred for.

first published by "The Southern Poetry Review" in 2011

​Cod

Boys fished in in back alleys
for bacalao, cod word
for female genitals

& codpieced knaves guffawed
at lines ending in scrod,
the body cut in strips

& packed in salt, bound south,
from Hyannis to Hatteras,
on a rogue boat. Pearls were

their eyes & from their gills
evolved our elegant
theory of ears.

first published by "Soundings East" in 2010

Geometry

How can you be the you who called
the table of contents the plate
of compliments, who named the water
bottle baba wayo? Tonight we cram

isosceles, scalene & how a rhombus
differs from a square. I love your
getting-wavy hair, the way your lashes
graze the page, their half-moon curve,

like your father's, when you nod off.
I don't know which I prefer: math
from your mouth or your textbook's
definition of a line, the part where

it goes on in both directions forever.

first published by "Four Corners" in 2008
reprinted in "Pomegranate Seeds / an Anthology of Greek-American Poetry" in 2008

Two Toothbrushes

Agree to disagree
over the onion's translucence,

the flame between saute and fry.
Stove top a slippery slope

after our spatter, silent treatment,
bitterly reciprocal.

If you stomp when you walk,
if when you shut you slam,

my recipe is deafness.
Your hunger's my best sauce.

Look at them, lying like us,
backs to each other

on the sink's rim. Is it something
I said or something I am?

first published by "The Same" in 2007

Sviluppo

What a weird word
looked at too long

in my Easy Italian Companion
at the Church Ave. station.

Definitions I daydream:
holy sieve, svelte wolf.

The F doors open, a hirsute man,
bearing the news in Urdu

shuffles off, elbows akimbo,
as my index finger hits the gloss,

development. I stare at C-H-U-R-C-H
spelled out on terracotta tiles

until there's nothing
but CH and UR.

first published by "Big City Light" in 2009

Dill

Lull in Norse, you
increase & induce
mothers' milk & sleep,

little fennel with your
branched taproot. Weird
sisters hasten from

the man who wears
a sack of you over
his heart. Humming

a Swedish hymn
doubles his luck
at catching salmon.

first published by "Epicentre" in 2012