Tender Ephemerality

4 poems I wrote this week

Mar 17, 2026

Hi everyone, here are four poems I wrote this week. A part of me hesitates about sharing them online. Shouldn’t I save them for a hypothetical audience? For literary journals, the future, money, something else? Maybe. But I feel compelled to share, and want to think of poems as continual. They keep coming. I try to remember: Don’t hold anything too rigidly, release with loving generosity, stay close to a tender ephemerality, and keep going.

If these move you, feel free to leave a note, send these to others, tip me, or let my sharing propel you into your own act of sharing (time, attention, money, your own poems, food, a joke.)

Sitting

Fog lifted off the mountain and settled
in my head.

The gold statue patiently watched me
squirm with one leg sleeping.

Breath counted to nothing.

A painting came into my head as I sat
on the hard floor:

Two birds–one white, one black, caught in the thick brushstrokes,
returning, returning,

and above them the word:
Truth.

It comes, it leaves,
only a slow wind
cleans the floor of the empty room.

Hilma af Klint, “Swans - No. 1.” From Art Gallery of NSW’s website: “In alchemy, the swan represents the union of opposites necessary for the creation of the philosopher’s stone…”

Release

The brick building sang quietly
when Flora and I biked past it.
He was inside, dying again, his body

thin, like yarn stretched and pulled until
it was wisps.

And down the street, there were still tomatoes in the garden,
a fistful of lavender on the table, dirt on the floor.
The bars on the windows still glistened.
She was alive again, too, and

A siren was still screaming
as an ambulance pulled into the old folks’ home across the street.
That long thin wail again.

She’s keeping her eyes on the TV.
It’s not her time yet.

Back of “Pleasures of Italy” by Derek Jarman. There were inscriptions under the paint, but a conservator found them. I love “night,” “masterpiece,” “me and my shadow",” and “trick or treat.” Will my secret words be found one day? Are they already exposed in poems?

Myth

The stone is pushed up the hill.
What happens to the thing
each time it tumbles down?
Doesn’t it chip away a bit? The myth

focuses on the man.
Zoom in
on his face.
The rock

against his hands.
Skin on stone,
earth plus water.

He will do this forever.

Someday
it will break down and he will be there
pushing the air

still feeling its weight