| poetry |
| recent publications |"Solstice Morning", Poetry As Promised Literary, December 2022 "Solstice 2021", The Literary Canteen, Autumn 2022 "Talismans" "The Call", Heart Balm Literary, September 2022 "Days Like This", Trash to Treasure Lit, Septebmer 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 |
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(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". |
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(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. |
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| 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, and The Literary Canteen. |