Current Dallas Poet Laureate

Confession: I did exactly the kind of woo-woo thing people assume artists do when the time came to write you this poem: I asked the universe to send me one. But, by Monday evening, stumbling through those last files in the back of my mind, I thought the universe had refused. Once again, I’d forgotten the work of a poet: to pay attention, to notice. Truth is, I’d already shared a patch of grass with a child who yanked silver eclipse glasses from his face and said yes, he’d seen it: as window in the sky. I’d looked at the photo my friend took before her plane landed—your grid bright and small as a microchip. I had even driven past, if not a terrific new moon, then a yellow kite caught in a tree branch. A lit stadium dome on the horizon. And you’d given me all of this.  

Written for the Poet Laureate announcement 4/10/2024 

The gas station speakers blast La Traviata when I stop to fill up. It’s nightfall. Downtown’s buildings glow neon against periwinkle shadows. Before you tell me this isn’t romantic, I know: studies have shown that opera music makes a space less desirable, that it might coax transient people and loiterers to move on.  But I can’t stop thinking about a book I read recently; how, in it, a scientist argued that music itself is a miraculous phenomenon. Because, he wrote, it’s hard to explain the way we hear songs—not just as individual chords and notes, but something whole. I wonder, might this show that we can override instincts, that we can resist the brain’s urge to pick apart every piece, asking, “which among these doesn’t belong?”  

for the Social Venture Partners’ PhilanthroParty on 4/27/24 and the Thanks-Giving Foundation’s National Day of Prayer Luncheon on 5/2/24

for the Dallas Public Library’s SMART Summer Kickoff Party on 6/1/2024

In school I took algebra and Spanish, learned the names of the planets, and counted the number of bones inside a mouse’s skeleton. But none of my teachers taught me how to make a cheese omelet float in mid-air, or how to make myself disappear, or how to do anything magicalat all really, until I studied poetry.

Then in class we read William Carlos Williams, whosewords showed us that a poem is often like a machine—it can turn things into ideas, and ideas back into things.

Imagine this: in a poem, the diving board over the pool might become part of a bridge, one that drops you into a secret new glimmering afternoon beneath the surface.

A poem can be filled with snowballs, or fuzzy puppies. Or, if you’re hungry, you can even nibble on a poem’s cloudpuffs, especially if they’re lightly spun with sugar- pink. The rules are just different in poetry.

Poems can make any long summer day into something more wondrous and strange, a place where you’re able to touch notes played by a violin and hear every shade of color between lavender and teal and orange, because poems always simply make their own sense.

After bedtime, if you just can’t sleep a wink, a poem’s moon might sneak in through your window so you can have a tea party while wearing the night’s shiny gems.

Or at high noon, once the sidewalk has grown too hot for making chalk art or bare feet, you can always take a sip from a poem that’s icy as lemonade, or wander deep into a poem’s forest cooled by rain.

The rules in poems are different, because every poem contains its own world that has its own physics. You can write a poem listing all of the ingredients needed to bake happiness, or write a poem that houses a zoo. Or, if you’re feeling sad because a friend just moved out of state, your poem can even create a new type of math, the kind where two minus one just equals blue.

I learned, back when I read Walt Whitman in school, that all of us humans contain multitudes. I read Aimee Nezhukumatathil and explored vast animal kingdoms. I read Naomi Shihab Nye and found clear evidence of miracles. Then Danez Smith showed me a way to cast spells, and Emily Dickinson finally taught me how to disappear.

So, if you ever find that you’re feeling uncomfortableunder your own roof, remember you could make a new one just by opening up a book. In fact, you could build a whole city, or an entire galaxy, and stuff it full of tree-houses, dinosaurs, and spacecars. All you’d even need are a pen and blank sheet of paper—because the rules,after all, are very different here.