Waxing & Waning publishes “Curb-Cut Effect” and “Not Exarcheia Sonnet.”

I'm happy to have two poems, "Curb-Cut Effect" & "Not Exarcheia Sonnet," published in the latest edition of Waxing & Waning.

Curb-Cut Effect

(when a targeted innovation benefits more people than it’s designed to assist.)

Design your city for ghosts. Make sure. there are plenty of places for them to sit; ethereal as they are, they get tired of floating around all day.

Design cities for ghosts. Walls don’t work anyway. The HVAC is philosophy.

Design cities for those who have died. They get tired of being lonely. It will also be a lithe city for the living, with inevitable segues to kitchen table oaths.

I noticed my hands were shaking. The paramedics tested my vital signs. Immobile, pale as a ghost.

Design your city for teenage pregnancy scares. Make sure there’s someone to lose hours with. Set an

empty chair by your bed.

Not Exarcheia Sonnet

(prompted by Megan Fernandes’ city sonnets)

Rooftops the color of ube in morning light; a trick I noticed at home not in Exarcheia. The places we visit with rats in the walls stay with us. So, here I am seeing

chimeras. Penumbras showing futures. Angels accompanying commuters. Houses surrounded by rubies.

I mistake where I’ve been for where I am;

the cities I’ve been to, for the city I’m in.

For example, am I eating honey-soaked baked goods across from the riot police or am I pushing people deeper into the carceral system?

This is the opposite of: We-are-now-as- distant-from-then-

than-then-was-from-then.

Because it’s still not as distant from when

I first listened to Me and the Devil on Vocalion records.

The ancient world is awake early this morning, mopping the paving stones in Exarcheia,

listening.

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