Excerpts from the book are forthcoming in The Southampton Review.

Included in the work is the poem: As If She Has Two Marbles in Her Ears

As If She Has Two Marbles In Her Ears

As if she has two marbles in her ears—
taupe and ochre swirls laced with
cream, ocean greens, light
sienna; deftly polished
glints of sterling silver—sounds of
clapping reach her mind, prism-
angled, from a small but yearning
distance, like a wind gust moving
through a bleached-out skull.

                        When she
prays, she lays her hands out like a
net over the sea.

Above her, in the ceiling, neon
lights become her newfound conste-
llations; the mythologies of
hospitals enacted in a
cold electric drama—sounds of
elevators, oxygen, the
pumps, the graying clocks.

                        When she
prays, her net of hands becomes a
quivering Cat’s Cradle.

Through the conches of her ears
she invites in all the
cadence of the ocean. Lying
drying in the bolted sterling
silver of her cot—withered
starfish on a pillow—she is
wondering if someone young is
going to pull her legs off.

I learned how the mind works

watching a stroke

dismantle my Grandpa.

If he wanted to know what day it was,

he’d say “Chris, tell me what…

…then his face would constrict,

his eyes would cross,

the skin on his neck would redden,

and spit would start to bubble

in the corners of his mouth

as he sputtered and stuttered

out words like week…year…month…

before arriving violently on DAY!

Then he would gasp with relief,

as if he’d finally found a breath

amidst a frenzy of sneezes.

“It’s okay, I’m just in the…bedroom…den…kitchen…BATHROOM!“

“He thinks in sets now,” my father said,

and it was true.

When he got stuck before a word,

you could see he knew it,

that it was in there somewhere.

But he had to run through the sets to find it.

My Grandpa.

He was the most straightforward man I ever knew,

albeit with a certain crusty flair.

His preferred assessment

of himself, the day, a meal, anything,

had always been “not so very bad.”

After his first stroke,

he switched from bluegrass to Dixieland,

and from banjo to mandolin.

“I just can’t make the same strings…keys…notes…CHORDS!”

My Grandpa once told me a story about his father,

how his father would sight down the line of fence posts

he had his seven sons pounding through the Kansas earth.

“I’m hell for straight,” he’d say,

and keep them at it until the posts

were exactly where he wanted them.

The last time I ever spoke to my Grandpa was over the phone.

I was in the west of Ireland,

he had just returned home from a hospital in Southern California.

“I almost died,” he said.

No sets. Straight.

and tenth anniversaries,
we walk along the beach.

It’s September.
I can tell by the depth of your eyes

that you’re missing your grandmother.
She died in a fury of refusal,

a woman of faith,
fighting cancer’s victory harder

than she ever fought its challenge.
I can feel you hating death

for being certain.
Just this morning, you stood up from breakfast,

the soft flesh of your face flushed and puffing,
to take your welling tears to the bathroom.

I rose to stop you, wrap you up,
felt you mutter into my shirt

that you cannot handle “this death thing.”
We keep walking,

with the water to our left.
Across the waves, there are cities

neither you nor I have been to.
They seem wilder than the water’s breaking tide,

so far from the immediacy of small cuts in our foot-skin,
so alive with the patina

of light contesting dark.
Did I feel you squeeze my hand?

I’m not sure if this is talk between lovers,
but I squeeze

back anyway, to let you know
I feel it to, the soothing lessons

of the ocean and the sunset.
Only after nightfall does Connecticut

take on an ordered beauty,
graying factories becoming

pearly pawns in a line
along the glowing green rim

of the sound.
Perversely,

a siren stains the air,
reminding me that, with the course

of this dream still uncertain,
it’s still possible

that someone else will die.