2 poems

some of the river

She looks into the flat silver river surface, millennia ago,
to see if she is beautiful. Forgive the outmoded feminine

attribution, the suggestion of hypersexualized vanity
the tired notion of female vacuity

but also fuck off, voice in my head,
polluting the surface of her flat silver memory

looking in the glass
to confirm she is beautiful

that everything that touches us leaves a mark
even the moving hand over moving water

even my mind with its judgements
a bird that flies over and over without landing

An Anthology

I could not wash the sweater vest I used to scream at him

for lying on, since it is all that remains of the dog.
I tried to toss it in with the non-delicate but stopped

when I brought it up to my nose and breathed again
his tangy urine, fragrant air from an innocent tail still in motion.

What memory will shake me if I clean it? My only memo
came from the masterful poet who said if we write

about our dead dog he’ll ban us from the anthology.
I would have screamed at him but I let his wife do it,

as he listened humbly in a scrubbed sweater vest,
to the high pitch of her voice, in the stink of the past

and who can blame him? Not the dog. Not me.