Poet Laureate 2026

SANGUINATION

Before I learned how to torture a single metaphor into a poem, and waited out the hot rain  on interminable summer nights, the blood flowed without restraint. I cataloged variations  between my father who was the original bleeder and myself, handkerchief forever to his  face. It wasn’t in him to betray a sorrowful emotion, though his nose did it for him, a  crooked river of blood as consolation. My nosebleeds began as a pseudo couvade  syndrome, and always occurred while I was in school, where the loss of blood  corresponded nicely with the measuring of all of my many deficiencies. It was an  education enough just to count how many things there were to lose. My father’s blood  spoke an in-between language to the memories that he couldn’t. Mine spoke what was to  be. That was the year that the old nun who sat in the office at the end of the hallway  would usher me into the bathroom, push my face down and let the blood fall into shapes I  could divine in the porcelain sink. She held a brass ring of keys to the back of my neck  while I cried with great energy at various intervals. When the bleeding slowed down, but  did not stop, I was sent back to class. Later, I would cancel out passages in my diary to  subvert my own loneliness. My father, wordlessly, as was his way, offered a brand of  sympathy I was unaccustomed to, like a church sermon gone rogue. Like a single  metaphor writ large.

MUSSOLINI’S BALCONY

It is good to trust others, but not to do so is much better. — Benito Mussolini 

In Rome I felt a fever. I navigated the uneven surface of the cobblestones. People milled  about in desultory ways in the summer heat. A young mother gripped the hand of her son  and yanked him to attention. Walk! She commanded, as he rubbed his eyes, the delicate  skin beneath them a study in violet. All around me I felt a great energy like my heart was  lit from the inside by neon, knowing it could end at any moment. Mussolini’s balcony,  above, was unimposing though I realized the importance of symbols. I wondered how his  frenzied supporters were able to discern their humble dreams from his rabid tyranny. The  national flag swayed to and fro, as I lost perspective. A tired looking man with a  beautiful wife stood still, her Fendi bag clutched to the delicate scaffolding of her chest  aware of her own allure. I smelled the strong perfume and cigarette smoke that  permeated everything. Somewhere, somehow, Mussolini hovered like an inconvenient  memory. The banality of the scene caught me off guard. I was sweating profusely,  perhaps on the verge of serious hallucination or heartbreak–I’d often had difficulty  discerning one from the other. I needed something ice cold as an antidote. A small girl  with narrow blue eyes stood watching a man with a milk snake wrapped around his thick  wrist, a small jar for coins at his twisted feet. The balcony loomed like an imperative. I  needed political and emotional orthodoxies that I could rely on or reject at the drop of a  hat. A crooked path that might lead me astray, but one that was possible to survive, if I  put my mind to it.

FESSURA 

The pale, spotted fruit in a cracked bowl was like a subtle offering to an angry, and far  away god. A woman can predict the future in the arterial formations of cracks in the  bridal dinnerware. Domestic boredom is nefarious if left unchallenged. All those buttons  on all those blouses and the fingers are constantly in motion. Half-cooked meals are  interrupted by feverish bellowing, invoking the flight of swallows, a heartsick longing for  the conveyance of swift flight to the familiar and terrible, the place where you cannot  return. The rind of the stubborn lemon under the cursed tongue was only a momentary  palliative. Light the candles during the day before the dark grabs you around the throat.  Separate the meat from the warm vine tomatoes, the right atrium from the superior vena  cava, and our moral lapses from our inevitable familiar limitations.