Brick Books will be publishing my next poetry book, currently titled ‘Belonging’. It’s been a long time coming, years and years of writing and polishing poems, then shuffling them into a folder. Since my last book I’ve had 2 babies, directed some films, written one novel manuscript and started another, and read lots of great books by Jacob Polley, Jeramy Dodds, Karen Connelly, Peter Behrens, Diana Fitzgerald Bryden, David Foster Wallace, Anar Ali, Camilla Gibb, Marguerite Pigeon… and so many more.

Individual poems from ‘Belonging’ have been published here and there, but I’ll be reading from the manuscript on Thursday, October 5 at the Brockton Writers Series’ 2nd birthday event with Patrick Connors and Aisha Sasha John. More information at this Facebook page:  Brockton Writers Series

I saw you one mile long, decade long
step ago on that beach where sand
washed back and forth at our feet,
your eyes like two chirrup notes,
a bird sighting its tree,
the call of the sea answered
in the fist of a brain tightening
over knowables not ascertained
but inherited like DNA
or bad character flaws.
a little crook in your smile
swindled my soul of its armour
and I saw you and the whole stretch
of what it would be, you and me -
the never closing mouth of a vast intimacy –
as eyes sought eyes under a
cloud-covered sun, the day bright
and precarious, like our love.

- – -

a hush on the phone, a dropped moment
and you are all underbrush, ferns,
delicate plants curling from sun.
I press on, my words a brisk breeze
agitating tall branches, a shadow-puppetry
of light falling to damp earth and its
fungal undergrowth of silent unfurlings:
between every word of ‘no’ is a curtailed ‘yes’
latticing its spores beneath the forest floor
to poke through rotting leaves, in the furrowed
bark of a tree, under mossy rocks bloom
soft white gills of attention

oh this is what it is to say yes in a hundred places
tiny hands pushing myself out from in,
this is love working its surgery on me
all my hearts opening and closing
their valves as I breathe.