My poem “Wind” is live at Feed the Holy. Initially published in The Blue Hour Magazine, it is also included in my first full-length collection, Our Loveliest Bruises. Thank you, Barbara Leonhard, for this and other kindnesses!
My poem “My Mother’s Ghost Scrubs the Floor at 2 a.m.” is featured today at Only Poems Daily.
Many thanks to Svetlana Litvinchuk and the Only Poems Team for featuring this poem!
“My Mother’s Ghost Scrubs the Floor at 2 a.m.” first appeared in The Indianapolis Review, was subsequently nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and is included in my debut full-length collection, Our Loveliest Bruises (3: A Taos Press, 2025).
I am thrilled to announce that my first full-length collection, Our Loveliest Bruises, is now available at 3: A Taos Press. Many thanks to publisher Andrea Watson for taking this book and seeing it through, and to Veronica Golos, whose wisdom and encouragement helped make a nebulous dream come true. I am also deeply grateful for the thoughtful and generous blurbs provided by Veronica, David Wevill, Anna Marie Sewell and Michael Simms. Thank you, thank you, thank you!
My poem “My Mother’s Ghost Sits Next to Me at the Hotel Bar” is live at Silver Birch Press. Many thanks to editor and publisher Melanie Villines for her continuing support. The poem was originally published inThe Lake, and is included in my first full-length book, Our Loveliest Bruises, forthcoming this fall from 3: A Taos Press.
When to Say Goodbye
If all goes well it will never happen.
The dry grass in the shade whispers
while the vines crunch underfoot,
releasing a bitter odor. A year ago
I led my dog to his death, the third
in five years. How such counting
precedes affection, dwindles ever
so slowly, one star winking out after
another, till only the morning gray
hangs above us, solemn, indefinite.
Voiceless. If I could cock my head
to howl, who would understand? Not
one dog or three, neither mother nor
mentor, not my friend’s sister nor her
father and his nephews, the two boys
belted safely in the back seat. No.
I walk downhill and closer to the creek,
where the vines are still green.
In the shade of a large cedar, a turtle
slips into the water and eases away.
* * *
“When to Say Goodbye,” drafted during the August 2015 Tupelo Press 30-30 challenge, was published by Oxidant | Engine in May 2017, and subsequently nominated for a Best of the Net 2017 award.
Destined by Gravity to Fail, We Try
Having fallen from the roof not once, but twice,
I verify that it is not the fall but the sudden stop that hurts.
The objectivist sense of the little: the and a, my house in this world.
Galileo postulated that gravity accelerates all falling bodies at the same rate.
While their etymologies differ, failure and fall share commonalities,
though terminal velocity is not one.
The distance between the glimpsed and the demonstrated.
Enthralled in the moment, Icarus drowned.
Rumor has it his plunge was due not to melting wax but to an improper mix
of rectrices and remiges: parental failure.
Thrust and lift. Drag. Resistance.
Acknowledgment of form in reality, in things.
When the produced drag force equals the plummeting object’s weight, the
object will cease to accelerate and will move at a constant speed.
To calculate impact force accurately, include the stopping distance in height.
Followed by long periods of silence.
This first appeared on the blog in December 2015.
Home: Living Between
My younger self dwelled in shadows propelled by light.
Indigo to ebony, in variant shades.
Concealed in language and skin, surrounded by shelved words.
Departed friends. Grass grown tall or baked to a brittle yellow.
The central order of a life arranged in sequence, orbiting through mother,
father, sister and passers-by glancing through our windows.
A parachute of discomfort billowing in the blue.
Distance and uncertainty beyond the nuclear family.
Acknowledging the new, still I looked inward.
The house as structure, as symbol, but always impermanent, unattainable.
Not rejection, but a liminal sense of being, of place.
Faces changed, but books carried me from city to state to country.
Translated from three views and speaking in brushstrokes across the wall,
slowly filled from edge to center, layer upon layer.
Containment, conjunction, circumstance. Triangle to circle.
No headstones mark my locus, no place bears my name.
Borders, the threshold of shared lives.
* * *
“Home: Living Between” was originally published at Allegro Poetry Magazine. Thank you, Sally Long, for taking this poem.
The Ecstatics
Divisions and separations, a summing of consequences,
the brother whose ashes remained forever lost. Two cities
and their survivors’ shame. The loud, kind young man
whose words fell to the restaurant’s floor, unbidden.
What came next in the drift, untoward and misspent,
in the grammar of between? Darkness, suppressed.
Smoke. Pleasure and fear, unclothed.
“The Ecstatics” first appeared here in January 2016. It’s an odd piece, part of a larger sequence that I put on hold several years ago. Perhaps I’ll return to it someday.
Article by Stephanie L. Harper:
Story Up at Spoonie Magazine!
http://slharperpoetry.com/2022/08/03/story-up-at-spoonie-magazine/
— Read on slharperpoetry.com/2022/08/03/story-up-at-spoonie-magazine/
A must read! Poignant and illuminating, and so true.
Sunday, June
Trying to give, I fail too often.
But this day we prepare for you
food that your beloved often cooked,
made with the ingredients of 19,000
nights and promises of more to come.
These potatoes. That beef, the fruit.
Simple, and yet so difficult to reproduce.
Even the recipe is incomplete. “Some
mayonnaise,” it says, then “mustard,”
but not whether dry or prepared, and
the amount is unclear. Yet the results
transport you to stronger days, to
the clear-eyed self and limitless
possibilities, meals on the table
at five o’clock, the satisfaction of work
well done, knowing that you have soared
above your father’s imprecations
but never beyond love’s touch, her
sleepy murmurs, morning coffee,
burnished histories and late cigarettes,
the tulips on the soil you’ll soon share.
“Sunday, June” first appeared in the print journal Nourish in March 2018.
O at the Edges 