Selected poems
From '[Witnesses]'
God is in the pine.
Walk to the edge of the woods and listen to him preach: God loves you and God will cut you down.
Near as a whisper, as prayer.
His hands balled in the cotton pockets of his cheap coat,tattered psalms pressed into skin.
He smells like dark, sweet dreams, a car leaving town down a dirt road.
God is more adorable than music.
God wakes up with bed head.He quotes from poets whose names are now lost.
He has something on his mind.
No one questions who God will take. Someone is always taken.
God created us with absence in our hands.
Can't he see that our bodies are just our bodies, tied to what we know?
We're small and flawed, but I want to be who I am.
Let us go on.
Take the line of the road, the American galaxy.Bring the ghosts. Shake the shadows off.
There is so much that clings to us, and wants to keep warm.
Note | '[Witnesses]' is a polyphonic testimony of the Trump and Pence years. An experimental found poem, it draws on the words of residents and citizens of the United States of America. This section of the poem cites the work of Vievee Francis, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Aaron Coleman, Cormac McCarthy, Lucie Brock-Broido, Jay Deshpande, Donald Revell, Sheena Raza Faisal, Tyree Daye, Natalie Diaz, Patricia Smith, Ada Limón, Brandon Kreitler, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Cortney Lamar and Charles Wright respectively.
The crime scene that is Australia
It's difficult to move in this landscape.Haunted and fragile and tragic,there's no place that is benign.
A cursed house, the Greeks might say.
Bright and hideous confusion — a giant noisethat blends into silence.
Willful forgetting.
Assertion of settler presence. Grievous burdens.Intervention. Deaths in custody. Stolen Children.Thousands of massacres, shootings and poisonings.
Land absorbed blood as readily as rain.
Note | 'The crime scene that is Australia' is a found poem arranged by the author and cites the work of Jeanine Leane, Robert Adamson, Ellen van Neerven, Elizabeth Campbell, David Brooks, David McCooey, Paul Daley, Judith Ryan and Paul Kane respectively. This poem has amended punctuation and line breaks.
The men of Manus
We/I/Us/The prisoners,
We have no rights. We are not safe. We are all sick.
[Seven] people have died.Many others have tried to kill themselves.Hundreds are kept hostage.
Isolated. Forgotten. Made to answer to numbers.
Exiled to Manus — an island/a jungle/a prison.
The crime is never named. No sentence is ever passed. So many people being broken.
The sound of the ocean reaches in.That sound creeps in from behind the jungle.
Note | 'The men of Manus' is a found poem