Once upon a time, I was forced, against my will, to write peotry. Then I decided it was good for me. I draw inspiration from John D'Agata. Here are a few samples...

Eastern Standard Time

67 Constance Street, Merrimack, New Hampshire: A grey cape with: forest teal shutters; a pool; a playset that included a trapeze; a wide, sloping hill perfect for sledding, except for the fact that it ended at a chain-link fence, a granite boulder, and the aforementioned playset. Location of first memory.

4 Paige Drive, Merrimack, New Hampshire: Same house. Addressed changed due to fire hazard implicit in having two streets in the same town with the same name.

306 Hood Hall, Ithaca College, Ithaca, New York: Cramped, double-occupancy dorm room, shared with the daughter of a Baptist minister in the Substance-Free housing unit, where I lost my virginity after an Ani DiFranco concert. Location of first joint.

211 Emerson Hall, Ithaca College, Ithaca, New York: Cramped double-occupancy dorm room, with a private bathroom! Bunked beds so we could fit a futon, where I heard my roommate and her boyfriend have sex the day they got matching Sanskrit tattoos. Location of first broken heart.

414 East Tower, Ithaca College, Ithaca, New York: Single occupancy dorm room, on same floor as best friends, with a drafty wall so that one night in January, I had to sleep in hat, coat, mittens, socks, laid out on top of the radiator to avoid the -30 degree cold. Where I first realized I loved the man who would leave me for the mountains.

224 West Spencer St., Apt. #4, Ithaca, New York: Top floor, three-bedroom apartment of sagging, grey, Victorian upstate New York house. Slanting balcony porch where I sat, watching the construction workers pave the road below, smoking cigarettes and typing essays. Our secret rabbit, Pedro, chewed through the wires connecting the speakers to my computer, before the landlord discovered his presence and Pedro had to go live with roommate’s parents. Location of first lease with my name on it. Last college apartment.

1763 Columbia Ave, NW, Apt. #411, Washington, District of Columbia: Fourth-story hardwood floor apartment with floor-to-ceiling window views of the Washington Monument, found in just a week ,after receiving my internship. Four girls in two bedrooms, an unfenced rooftop, an old brick building surrounded by Ethiopian restaurants, fire engine sirens and themed nightclubs, walking distance to my big city, office park job. After three months of summer-humid mid-Atlantic city life, I am ready to leave the East Coast, for the first time.



Drift Plain
(some bits of this poem harvested from Landforms of Iowa by Jean Prior)

As this dissected landscape was evolving,
as the muscles beneath my skin began to shift
like tectonic plates, splitting
causing earthquakes

The oldest landscape surface was left at the highest elevation; newer, younger surfaces each cut into lower landscape positions and into stratigraphically older material.

Glass shards and pumice fragments:

All those distinctive visual clues—

a lobster-red sunburn on the left arm only;
a texture of finely etched rills;
a tangle of wind-blown hair;
a distinct ribbed or furrowed appearance to the terrain;
piles of empty plastic bottles and crumpled cellophane wrappers;
the tiny, blood-specked scar on my left knee, and the purple one on my right ankle;
a road atlas from 1994; a coded list of interstate highways;
the space between hills,

The terrain of this region provides a feeling of enclosure when we travel among its hills. Views extend only as far as the next ride or the next bend in the road.
There are no long-distance vistas.

the space between hills—
reveal past irregularities.

Reveal the domed skies of New Hampshire held
In my arms, and the cityscape of 18th and Columbia,
as my legs dangled out the fourth story window.

Reveal the big Montana sky, the stretches of land
between here and the mountains:
the Bridgers,
the Spanish Peaks,
the Tobacco Roots and
the Crazies.

Reveal the vastness of ocean,
and the wide, raging Western rivers,
glaciers standing in their headwaters.

This ancient soil profile
caught in the creases of my palm.
This dendritic network
spinning around my wrist twisting in the wind
as I cross the Mississippi.

Rainfall and snowmelt percolating through the loess tend to move laterally once they reach the less permeable clay of this paleosol.