A poem — The woods are full of water, small creeks that trickle down from the mountains like moose carving paths with wide bodies and a quartet of sharp hooves that leave split clefs on clay and sand. This is a solution to boredom, a way to wander blank upon the land until fear…

A poem — All of us stand to drink on a cold afternoon, watch the ducks exchange feathers for a rich dripping fat over the fire. We gulp down beers and talk about a train line that moved ground goods between water mills. We talk about disease, a loss of direction, how the…

A poem — There is something about an atlas late at night, spread across the table, water rings left by liquor glasses. A single finger can map a road trip across the Andes, more vast than Saudi Arabia, six times the size of Iraq. Listen to the sound of runways and runoff, places…

A poem — Where do the bugs go, when you turn on the lights? This was a question answered by the door lamp of a vacation rental car. There seemed unlimited space to hold their crispy bodies, a sensory orgy of frantic retreat. What must it feel like to be so arrested? To…

Wild Roof Journal Podcast, Episode #24 — I had the honor of attending the contributor reading for Wild Roof Journal and sharing my poem Negative Land. You can watch it on YouTube. I give a brief story about the poem starting at 18:45. 📺Watch the reading About the Poem I cover this in the reading, but I thought I would…

A poem — There is a black mask resting in the gutter, dead leaves and spruce needles, a wet and discarded thing. Protection once coveted, once required, now celebrated with all the ceremony of a fast-food burger box, a bakery wrapper left behind a recycling bin on an empty street. To be a…

A poem — We are all heroes for cleaning up the kitchen after a Sunday garden party; toss the limes from empty gin and tonics, dump the ice that chilled the Pinot Grigio, scrape off the melted wet charcuterie board of Spanish cheese and homegrown wildflowers. Like the hornets, we can’t get enough…

A poem — A woodpecker wakes me up each morning — a faraway knock at the new horizon. I stretch my legs under the sheets, look up into the still blades of the ceiling fan, search with my hand for the warmth of my wife’s bare back, the tangles of her hair, woven…

A poem — The tops of clouds look like the waves that loiter in a clay teapot above the flames of carbon tamed beneath this broiling house of cards. It takes as long as it will take to open up my tin can gut, to spill my promises in layers of sounds we…