I’ve always loved words and have written poetry for most of my life. I’ve read my work locally since I was in community college and recently found myself reintroduced to a wonderful community of writers, including some of the authors I met at first in my twenties.
In the past couple of years, I’ve performed featured readings for Calling All Poets hosted by Mike Jurkovic and Jim Eve, as well as Next Year’s Words hosted by Susan Chute and Tim Brennan (two excellent series in the Hudson Valley gone virtual during the pandemic) and did a livestream feature from Greenkill Gallery in Kingston, NY that you can watch here.
Below you can read some of my published work. Most of these selections have appeared in various volumes of the Shawangunk Review unless otherwise noted. See my publications page for other related projects.
Survivor’s Guilt
Prepare yourself.
Prepare your shoeless feet for
paths scattered with stone, shells, bone-shatter, casings.
There will be flowers,
stems bound like limbs,
bunches of legs dangling above water;
flowers pulled from fields,
dug from torn ground, rootless.
There will be blood-black blooms,
mud-colored hair spilling like petals,
dark shards arranged in sharp angles.
Those chosen could not prepare:
Captives cast off like chaff
or thrown atop pyres,
stalks askew, barbed leaves lifting
like ash-flecked palms in prayer.
Prepare yourself:
the rampart about your heart bursting with grief,
as shrapnel seeps into tight red bud.
from the Shawangunk Review
***
Things That Have Nothing to Do With Grief
I.
I pull her red corduroy jacket
around me like the blanket my mother
crocheted for our first apartment.
II.
Fingernails split like
petals of dried orchids.
***
First Snow
White hush muffles
birdsong and car-whir.
Storm silence slows
slim veins of water, stills
branch-sway, weekend rush.
Banks rise: bodies breathing.
The glint of everything unsaid
stirs in the slippery dark.
from Reflecting Pool: Poets and The Creative Process, edited by Laurence Carr (This collection also contains an essay on my coming of age with poetry, and how that shapes how I teach ENG399, Understanding Poetry)
***
Bent
The cracking back as
he presses the knots in her
undoing each tie.
***
Taboo
In thirty-four years, I was born and you died twice.
At birth, Catholic charities sent you to live upstate
with silence and faces that look nothing like you.
Incubator womb, oxygen tube, jaundice,
four pounds: I took seven months to cultivate.
In thirty-four years, I was born and you died twice.
In a barn, on feed bags infested with mice,
my father took you. The jaws of life extricate
your silence and faces that look nothing like you.
The suckling denied breast still grew.
Mothers mourn the empty house’s weight.
In thirty-four years, I was born and you died twice.
Still I pick up your unfamiliar voice
calling like an old psalm. What’s akin alienates:
Silence and faces that look nothing like you.
One labored, the other raised and gave advice.
Only a child of two tribes can relate.
In thirty-four years, I was born but both died twice—
in silence with faces that look something like you.