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| recent publications |



--2023

"Mycorrhiza"
"Native Light"
"Summer Rain", from The Hemlock Poems, collaborative chapbook (Present Tense Media).
Also as broadsides supporting the Conservation Through Art: Saving Alabama's Hemlocks exhibit. October 2023

"Wishing (for the ones no longer here)", The Field Guide Mag, September 2023

"Remind Yourself This is Just Practice", Litmora, August 2023

"Watching the News", Do Geese See God, August 2023

"Earthshine", Cosmic Daffofils Journal, August 2023

"We knew what would come", Dollar Store Magazine, July 2023

"Let it be so quiet", Pink Hearts Mag, June 2023

"Meniere's"
"Apogee"
"Grief"
"Ephemera"
"Insomnia", Stark Nights Lit, May 2023



--2022

"Solstice Morning", Poetry As Promised Literary, December 2022

"Solstice 2021", The Literary Canteen, Autumn 2022

"The Secret Field", Livina Press, October 2022

"Talismans"
"The Call"
, Heart Balm Literary, September 2022

"Days Like This", Trash to Treasure Lit, September 2022

"Morning Glories", Poetry As Promised Literary, August 2022

"What Has Bedded in the Grass?", Palest Blue Magazine, August 2022

"Transitions", Erato Magazine, July 2022

"Finding the Graves", The Minison Project, June 2022

"Land for sale", Boats Against the Current, June 2022



| selected works |




(from the chapbook Follow This Creek)
Follow This Creek


Thirty feet from the edge
I put my hands
in this water and listen
to the same muffled roar,
glimpse the bands of mist
rising from the canyon
below, the same way this
small pool of water
I have cupped within
my fingers sounds
as the current flows
toward the inevitable.

And it is late spring,
and old leaves from winter
are still leaving the forest
floor, marching with caution
to the creek's bank
where they wait for a breath
of wind, or a gentle push
to guide them,
not to me-
toward something larger
farther along down.

(from Pregnant Moon Review)
Sipsey


Some miles out in the wilderness
we found Johnson cemetery, the August
air cutting our lungs like the chiseling
of head stones would have it's carver's
hands a century ago.
Our camping trip waited to bloom
like web caterpillars hugging
the understory treetops,
and I remembered the neighbor's
child crying a song he made for them
when his parents burned those nests
out of the lower limbs of their pecan
(only he could see a butterfly waiting)

We cooled ourselves in the shallow river,
but as we sat watching a wild boar
feel it's way along the opposite brush,
I felt a tiny army of seed ticks rising up
my briar torn legs, as my friend's eyes
did with a fear he's known before, watching
his cousin die from Rocky Mountain fever.
Later, they still didn't know how he pulled
through, though it seemed some small
push at the end saved him.
Perhaps as it did me, years ago,
leaning over a cliff a little too far,
the soft wind whispering back, "Not yet".


(from Westward Quarterly)
Time


Miles are longer,
when your knees say so.
The desire to catapult
young-hearted rock to rock gone,
your consequences considering
mind hesitant at finding
the way across the creek,
when home is closer.

But any old trail will still do,
even as the wide paths
close with darkness
with each end of day.
And the moon, never enough,
waits with the rest of us
for morning to come.


(from Waterways)
Tredegar


I took the old railroad grade
leading down to where the sun
disappears beneath tall pines;
crossed the stream on a fallen oak,
pushed back the brush guarding
the entrance to the abandoned
iron mill and sat on a granite stone,
admiring the piles of slag and broken
bricks that litter the base of the
remaining walls, the stone structure
weathered like an old book.

I have been here before,
shovel in hand, ready to stake claim
to these mine cart wheels, or
the long rusted rail lines once used to transport
iron ore across the rotted bridge.
But with each visit I am greeted
with more undiscovered country,
turning history over and over
in the palm of my hand.


| journals featured in |



The Blue Review, The Magpie's Nest, Almia, Offerings, Something Else, Down in the Dirt, Westward Quarterly, The Poet's Art, Oak, Poetic Hours, Speedpoets, Write On!! Poetry Magazette, Poetry of the People, Black Book Press, Waterways, Ceremony Collected, Pregnant Moon Review, The Poet's Haven, Illogical Muse, Boats Against The Current, The Minison Project, Erato, Palest Blue Magazine, Poetry As Promised Literary, Trash to Treasure Lit, Heart Balm Literary, Livina Press, The Literary Canteen, Pink Hearts Mag, Dollar Store Magazine, Cosmic Daffodils Journal, The Field Guide Mag, Do Geese See God, Litmora.