Featured Poems
Lesser Verbs Run the Risk of Going Extinct
according to some linguists, lest we take
for granted forsook will linger
past forsake—just wait
until wed becomes wedded, creep evolves
from crept to creeped, a process already underway—
a reminder evolution lurks in language:
what we speak is not what we spoke
nor what will be spoken
if we correct what doesn’t agree.
The agreement itself may change,
so why mourn the dangling participle,
the inevitable passing of the irregulars?
One day we’ll fail to recognize
our very forms. Use it or lose it, experts say
of speech, but what part of the participle is dangling,
I ask ChatGPT, which says it’s the one left
without a proper subject,
bereft
the way I feel when I forget
the names of birds who trilled outside
my houses, year after year: Northern perula, robin—
I hear them now, singing how
my slit heart slitted when they left,
how at the end, my lungs, a bellows, billowed
all my notes, compressed, as I pleaded—
no, I pled, my requiem
for the future of the past tense,
all of the ear I’ve lost.
What We Read About Ukraine Makes Us Dream of Burning
On the road between villages
like Mriya and Myla, whose names mean Dream
and Sweetheart in our tongue,
mothers ink their children’s backs
with family contacts: uncle, aunt, grandmother,
lest the mothers die and the children
be found alone. Lest we forget
the address they called home.
***
In my dream, I am a candle
that burned all night, despite the many ways
my wick might mushroom,
ignite. Like any good flame
I tapered, acquiescing
to my extinction.
Yet I wavered, just a little,
nestled in the candelabra’s arm,
imagining a door might open,
and it would be you, holding an oil lamp
or a flashlight, moving toward me
just as close as you are far,
as if you never had the earth you came from torn
from your long fingers, stolen
like the light we took for granted
or the morning—you whose heart homed
like a pigeon dispatched in the war, to carry words
we can’t speak or imagine.
Other Poems
- “I Tell Myself if You Don’t Survive, You’ll Go Down Kicking” (The Christian Century, 2026)
- “An Orphan Absorbing Her Late Mother’s Gaze Wonders if Any Vision Is Eternal” (pending in Cleaver Magazine, 2026)
- “Solace” (pending in On the Seawall, 2026)
- “Reciprocity” (The Christian Century, 2026)
- “A Sonnenizio After a Line by Gerard Manley Hopkins” (The Christian Century’s Poem of the Week, 2026)
- “Baggage Claim” (One Art, 2026)
- “Lesser Verbs Run the Risk of Going Extinct” (Cumberland River Review, 2026)
- “One Day’s Inventory” (Sugar House Review, 2025)
- “The Lie,” “For An Artist Painting Loss,” “In the Men’s Department at Montgomery Ward,” “Master,” “Blind Spots,” “Breach Points,” “The Body Inside My Body,” “The Package,” and “Wardrobe Therapy” (UCityReview, 2025)
- “A Duplex For the Day After Retirement” (SWWIM Every Day, 2025)
- “Bearings” (Split Rock Review, 2025)
- “Anchorage” (Glass Poetry Journal, 2025)
- “A Southern Black Racer Plays Dead in the Dollarweed” (Stirring: A Literary Collection, 2025)
- “I Revisit My Father’s Rooms at His Home in Alaska” (St. Katherine Review, 2024)
- “Another Day’s Inventory” and “Wyeth’s Women” (Body Literature, 2024)
- “Abditive” (Cider Press Review, 2024)
- “Orienteering” (Palette Poetry, 2024)
- “Friesian Story” (Radar, 2024). Hear me read it! PUSHCART NOMINATED
- “Pendulum” (South Dakota Review, 2024)
- “Avian Inventory” and “Riding Lessons” (Louisiana Literature, 2024)
- “Evidence” (Kestrel, 2024)
- “Tahane Recalls His Escape” (Sweet Literary Review, 2024). Hear me read it! PUSHCART NOMINATED
- “The Rose Bush” (Anacapa Review, 2023)
- “Proof” (Atlanta Review, 2023)
- “The Trees in Dealey Plaza Seemed Distressed” (in ASP Bulletin, 2023)
- “Fault Line” (San Pedro River Review, 2023)
- “When Time Ran Out, I Took the Clock In” (trampset, 2023)
- “Refuge” (Sugar House Review, 2023)
- “What We Read About Ukraine Makes Us Dream of Burning” in Gulf Coast Review, 2023)
- “Lacuna” (Valparaiso Poetry Review, 2023)
- “The Grief Committee” (Bear Review, 2023)
- “Flyover (Asheville Poetry Review, 2023)
- “Emergence” (Cumberland River Review, 2023)
- “Lionfish Hunter” (Stirring: A Literary Collection, 2023)
- “It’s Common for Alzheimer’s Patients to Reach for a Word” (Redivider, 2022)
- “Monuments,” “What You Don’t Know Can’t Hurt You,” “All You Can Fit in a Suitcase” and “In Florence, In the Summer of ’69” (One Art, 2022)
- “Space Invaders” and “Everywhere We Once Knew Wildness” (Zone 3, 2022)
- “If the Fragment is the Story” was a finalist in River Heron Review’s 2022 Poetry Prize Contest and appeared Aug. 1 in the journal’s contest issue.
- “The Chickadees Are All Up In Our Feelings” (Atlanta Review, 2022)
- “All My Father’s Heroes” (The Worcester Review, 2022)
- “Survival Guide” was a finalist in the 2022 Sweet Literary Review Poetry Prize Competition and was published in the journal’s contest issue (2022)
- “Intimates” (Pacifica, 2022)
- “The Brazilian Peppertrees” (Twelve Mile Review, 2022)
- “Daylight Savings” (Twelve Mile Review, 2023)
- “The Attraction to Niagara” (Split Rock Review, 2022)
- “Relative Risk” (Aquifer/Florida Review, 2022)
- “In the Hollow” (Sweet Literary Review, 2021)
- “You Can Stay in a Place Too Long” (Rust and Moth, 2021)
- “The Great Egret” (Five Points, 2021)
- “The Beach House Offers an Elegy” (Whale Road Review, 2021) PUSHCART NOMINATED
- “When Blood Flow to the Heart Slows, Stops’ (SWWIM Every Day, 2021)
- “What You Called Your Mother Came to Me”; “After the Fall”; “Reunion”; “Reverse Universe”; “Speaking of God”; “Viral” and “All the Dog Couldn’t Tell Me of Desire” were all published in UCity Review in its Noteworthy Poet feature (2020)
- “Weightless” (Atlanta Review, 2020)
- “Geography” (Stirring: A Literary Collection, 2020)
- “Meanwhile, America is Losing its Memory” (Broad River Review, 2020)
- “Watching the Waning Gibbous Moon” (Yemassee, 2020)
- “Recovery” (Grist: A Journal of the Literary Arts, 2020)
- “Consistency” (Frontier Poetry 2019)
- “What’s Left of Us is Shaken” (Split Rock Review, 2019) PUSHCART NOMINATED
- “A Purse is a Mother is my Birthright”, first honorable mention recipient in SWWIM Every Day’s Purses for Poetry Contest, (SWWIM Every Day, 2019)
- “An Ordinary Life”, Pushcart-nominated by Concrete Wolf Press from my collection, Accommodations was a finalist in Atticus Review’s 2019 Poetry Contest (Atticus Review 2019)
- “At Rhine Falls”, “We Gather in Florida to Celebrate My Father’s Life”, “Alyeska at Our Midnight”, and “Ice-out” (Alaska Women Speak, 2019 and 2020)
- “A Pileated Woodpecker Shares Where to Find God” SWWIM Every Day (2019)
- Personal Cure for Consumption” (South Florida Poetry Journal: Poets Respond to the Prompt section, 2019)
- “What I Tell My Children When They Ask Me Where I Come From” (Glass Poetry Journal 2019)
- “Coming Home” (Barrow Street 2019)
- “What We Carry” (Palette Poetry, 2018)
- “Personal Effects”, Pushcart-nominated by Concrete Wolf Press, (Potomac Review, 2018)
- “Exploring Roots in the Hair Salon” (Glass Poetry Journal, 2018)
- “Mary Is No Longer Working For The Company” (South Florida Poetry Journal , 2018)
- “Royal Palms Defend Their Place in the Condo Universe” (Gravel Magazine, 2018)
- “Before Landfall” (SWWIM Every Day, 2018)
- “Paris Voices” (Valparaiso Poetry Review, 2018)
- “The Changed Landscape” (The Christian Century , 2018)
- “Our Last House” (Barrow Street, 2018)
- “Imprinted” and “Questions for the Plumber During Remodeling” (UCity Review, 2017)
- “Making Soda Focaccia the Day of the Muslim Ban” (Rise Up Review, 2017)
- “Exotic Taste” (Superstition Review, 2016)
- “When Memory Goes From the Hands” (Gyroscope Review, 2016)
- “Temple Grandin Charms the Academics” (Gyroscope Review, 2016)
- “Card to Kim” (Arsenic Lobster, 2016)
- “Identity Theft” (Amaryllis, 2016)
- “Sinkhole” (The Carolina Quarterly, 2013)
- “Grandmother’s Will” (Cottonwood, 2009)
- “Upheaval” (Portland Review, 2007)
- “Nutritional Value” (Rattle, 2006)
- “My First Steps” was a finalist in a poetry contest sponsored by So to Speak (2004)
- “Letters Home” (Rock Salt Plum Review, 2004)
- “After Dark” (Concho River Review, 2003)
- “The Opal Box” (Hogtown Creek Review, 2002)
- “What Comes Out” (South Dakota Review, 2002)
- “As If The Wish Were Flawed” (South Dakota Review, 2002)
- “Climbers” and “Settlement” (The Cape Rock, 2002)
- “The Heart Contracts” (Bogg, 2002)
- “Breath” (Tule Review, 2000)
- “Light and Shadow” (Prolog, 1996)
- “First Day of Hurricane Season” (Tampa Tribune, 1991)
- “The Service” (Black Buzzard Review, 1990)
- “Dressmaker” (Tampa Bay Review, 1990)
- “Discovery” (Unknowns, 1984)
- “Pillows” Encore, (1983) and North of Wakulla, an anthology from Anhinga Press (1990)
- “Final Draw” (Florida Review, 1981)