I didn’t ask the caterpillar
with its antennae tangled
criss-cross in a cobweb
if it wanted to be healed,
Decades Later, You Misremember Wildflowers
Maybe it happened like you thought
or maybe you just gathered memories
like a bouquet of shards: glass, plastic,
stone—strewn and demolition-dusted.
Ocular Migraine with Waterbirds
I heard you call my name.
The wire of your voice pulled tight
through the hallway.
A Child’s Grief
We entered Yellowstone, and you gaped
at charred tree trunks,
where acre after acre of still-scarred land
had burned six years before.
Suffer the Little Children
Along the Rio Grande, in Ciudad Juárez,
amid the high Chihuahuan desert,
when bitter winter arrives, asylum
seekers like a Zacatecas grandfather
make coffee in a pot from water
frozen overnight
One night when I am gone
J. M. Jordan recently began writing again after a twenty-year hiatus. He is a Georgia native, a Virginia resident, and a homicide detective by profession. His poems have appeared recently in The Chattahoochee Review, Image, The Carolina Quarterly, Dappled Things, Louisiana Literature, Modern Age and elsewhere.
Brother Frank Walks the Abbey Woods
I never tire of these woods,
having walked them since I arrived
young, intemperate, intent on living
beyond death among these men of practiced habit.