Publshed Work

The Enormity of It

- Mojave He[Art] Review, Issue 17, September 2019

Vacuum

Transgendered Ex at Son's Birthday Party

- Bourgeon, June 2019

Oracle of the First Kiss

- Published in Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Issue 19:4, Fall 2018

Leaves of Late November

- Published in Nightingale and Sparrow, Issue 1, February 2019

The Clotheshorse

Rats

- Published in The Novice Writer, Issue 1, Spring 2019

Cowboys

- Published in Mercurial Stories, Vol. 1, Issue 34: Dawn, Fall 2018

Kiss Planted

For My Dad, Ron E.

1940-2012

Tastes of salt, grey, tang of tobacco, sweet sweat like

ground mace, garlic and lemon paste have clung

to my lips for seven years. The last kiss planted

on your forehead, watered aplenty in your passing,

bloomed past grief, casting a shade of melancholy.

Makes it easy to window-stare for hours, meditate on

stones, gravity, creases, and spicy scents that endure.

I stop and double take whenever passing the smoke

of cigars or cherry pipe tobacco, increasingly rare.

I remember you, tall and linear in black and white in

the pipe days, before you lost teeth to hold the bit.

Less often in the cigar days, shorter,

built of 45 degree angles.

I don’t begrudge that you forgot me. Who

was the most me to you? Parenting hosts

a fair amount of missing, the adorable

toddler, lost in a larger form.

Backing out of the room, I thanked you until my throat

was dry; you bedridden, slight beneath

the sheet. The same man I met at the door

when I was little with a kiss on the lips.