Poetry
I write poetry all day long. I always have. I type out a line or two here and there on my phone. Jot down some title ideas in my notebook during meetings. I even dictate whole poems into a voice-recording app while driving to work. Then I spend too many hours revising and revising and revising. Most of my poems never make it to the stage where I'm comfortable sending them out for others to read. I hope you enjoy reading the ones that have made it to the finish line.
Featured Poems
"Why I Pulled All the Reds from My Crayola Box"
Hobart, May 2025​​
A child’s fear of dreaming in red, shaped by a father’s myth and later debunked by technology, becomes a haunting meditation on belief, memory, and the erosion of inherited truths.​
Rattle: Poets Respond, October 2025​
A child narrates their family’s visit to a food bank, capturing the quiet shame, fragile hope, and fleeting sweetness of poverty through the image of a “temporary” hunger line.​
Live reading on Rattlecast
Rattle, October 2025​
A meditation on loss and desolation. A community scorched by fire prays in vain for relief, finding only silence and ash in place of divine comfort.
*Ekphrastic Challenge--Editor's Choice*
Sky Island Journal, October 2025​
The poem portrays how, even after burning letters to erase the past, the speaker finds that memory, intimacy, and loss linger like smoke and ash that cannot be extinguished.
A-minor Magazine, January 2026​
A speaker imagines dissolving into memory and decay, becoming one more forgotten object inside a lover’s quiet, sealed forgetting.​
More Poems
2025
Maudlin House Journal, March 2025​
At a bus stop, mutual suspicion turns two strangers into imagined predators until a polite gesture exposes the fear beneath their assumptions.
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​"The Light We Pass On"
Teach. Write. Literary Journal, April 2025​​
Teachers are depicted as flames who move into darkness to share their light so others can discover purpose and pass it on.
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Down in the Dirt Magazine, May 2025​​​
Familiarity dims the moon’s wonder until a quiet unexpected glimpse restores its quiet magnificence.​​
*Selected for Scars Publications' Annual Anthology*
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Trampoline: A Journal of Poetry, June 2025​
A crooked tree once mistaken for a flaw is revealed as the marker of a family boundary, symbolizing inheritance, rupture, and renewal.
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Not One of Us Magazine, July 2025​
A bystander grapples with guilt and complicity as he witnesses an old man silently endure humiliation, collecting pennies thrown at him by mocking schoolboys.​​​
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FLARE Magazine, August 2025​
A speaker rejects society’s label of disability and reclaims it as a powerful, self defined expression of difference and strength.​
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horror senryu journal, September 2025​
The poem juxtaposes ritual and mortality in just seven words, where the solemn toll of faith clashes with the gravedigger’s off-key hum, unsettling the harmony between reverence and decay.​
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Five Fleas Itchy Poetry, September 2025​
The poem depicts the speaker being consumed and erased by a relentless, devouring force symbolized as a drain with watery teeth.​
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Sacramento Literary Review, October 2025​
A haunting encounter with a once-intimate woman now rendered unrecognizable, "a stranger" explores the ache of seeing someone you once knew become a blurred memory, familiar in form but empty.
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"Bird of Judgement"
Unleash Lit Press, October 2025​
A man confronts a silent, watchful bird at his pond that becomes a symbol of self-judgment and condemns him for emotional detachment.
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Unbroken: Prose Poems, October 2025​
A father with cystic fibrosis confronts his mortality during a coughing fit as his daughter innocently asks about his illness and a fragile image of a last breath lingers between them.​
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"Furred Mercury, the Spider Girl"
4LPH4NUM3R1C, November 2025​
A ringmaster recounts a surreal encounter with a mother spider performing under circus lights, her web and scattered offspring transforming the mundane into a cosmic act of loss and creation.
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The Eunoia Review, April 2025​​
A child hides in a worn living room fort, finding quiet wonder in lamp light while the noisy world rumbles just beyond the door.​
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​"A Few Stops Away"
Willawaw Journal. April 2025​
A solitary commuter waits for a bus and realizes he may be waiting for connection and love that never arrives.
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LowLife Lit Press, May 2025​
The poem confronts the reader with the raw, uncomfortable reality of homelessness and challenges the shallow, judgmental ways people excuse their own indifference.
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​"Testing the Darkness"
Down in the Dirt Magazine, June 2025​
The poem explores the thrill of confronting fear, whether in the darkness of the woods or the safety of a well-lit room, emphasizing the significance of testing oneself against the unknown.​​
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​"Another Storm, Another Day"
Pinhole Poetry Journal, July 2025​
A man moves through his morning routine as news of repeated shootings blurs into background noise, revealing how constant tragedy has become another storm we pretend is only rain.
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​"Ken Griffey Jr. on Cardstock"
The SportScribe, August 2025​
A nostalgic collector secretly chases childhood magic and lost innocence through late-night eBay purchases of Ken Griffey Jr. baseball cards, even as guilt and aging shadow the thrill.​
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horror senryu journal, September 2025​
The poem transforms the mechanical rhythm of a drill into a dark music that drowns out human pain.​
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​"I Don't Get It"
Teach. Write. Literary Journal, April 2025​​
A writer spirals into self-doubt after hearing “I don’t get it,” ultimately questioning whether the failure is theirs.​
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Sage Cigarettes Magazine, April 2025​​​
The death of an old dog becomes a profound awakening, stirring the speaker from the numbness of routine and inspiring a reconnection with life, purpose, and genuine joy.
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"Mall Monument to a President"
New Verse News, May 2025​
A father filters political deals through his four year old’s innocent logic, exposing the absurdity and moral confusion he senses but cannot quite name.
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The Ekphrastic Review, July 2025​
An artist embraces flaws in both self and canvas, realizing that imperfection is proof of having dared to create and exist authentically.
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scaffold, August 2025​
As a tree abandons its roots and leaves a desert behind, the speaker sits barefoot in unexpected warmth, reflecting on displacement and change.
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The SportScribe, August 2025​
Juxtaposing Ty Cobb’s ruthless legend with a failing relationship, the speaker reveals how emotional harm can be inflicted without ever making contact.​
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Cold Moon Journal, September 2025​
This poem captures the image of a decayed walnut whose hollowed interior has soured, evoking transience and rot.​
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​"Home Depot Hero"
Little Old Lady Comedy Magazine, September 2025​
A playful, mock-epic poem in which a man dramatizes unclogging a sink as a heroic quest, only to be outdone when his partner reveals she already fixed the real problem with ease.
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Amethyst Review, September 2025​
A discarded, handwritten prayer found on the floor is transformed into a symbol of grounded honesty, unable to soar but still sacred.​
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Sacramento Literary Review, October 2025​
A night guard kills a porcupine on instinct, revealing how fear and habit can drive us to destroy what we do not understand.​
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Unleash Lit Press, October 2025​
An abandoned childhood home is overtaken by creeping vegetation, forcing the speaker to confront how time and nature consume both buildings and buried memories.
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"Shed"
Unleash Lit Press, October 2025​
After a destructive relationship, the speaker imagines shedding a borrowed identity like skin and driving toward a painful but self reclaimed sense of self.
"Threadbare Gold and Groundhog Soup"
3Elements Literary Review, November 2025​​
A grandson reflects on his grandfather’s humble faith, quiet strength, and enduring legacy.​​
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​"Sponges"
The Drift & Dribble Miscellany, October 2025​
A parent moves through a morning of automated comforts while their children, echoing the news broadcast in play, unknowingly embody the world’s violence that seeps into their innocence.​
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​"Ghosts in the Tree Stands"
San Antonio Review, November 2025​
Returning to the family farm, the speaker feels the lingering presence of generations of hunters whose vanished figures still seem stitched into the trees.
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New Feathers Anthology, December 2025​
After his grandfather’s death, the speaker learns that love is not what you keep but what marks and transforms you, lingering like a vivid stain across memory and grief.​
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Bubble Tea Literary, December 2025​
A son reflects on generations of backbreaking labor and honors his father’s sacrifice by forging a different future through education and freedom.
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2026
Wild Roof Journal, January 2026​
A speaker lingers at the edge of a grove, haunted by a lost love whose presence feels alive in the dark, as if the woods themselves are waiting with them in silence.​
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The Muleskinner Journal, March 2026​
A man sits in church unable to worship, consumed by fear of violence and imagining how everything around him could become a weapon.​
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"The Fish Tank Hours"
Blue Rivers, [Forthcoming, April 2026]​
A speaker reflects on generations of miners and the quiet, shared vigil of watching fish tanks and hospital rooms as a way of holding love, breath, and unspoken grief when words—and lungs—fail.​
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"Hope Was a Thing with Papers"
Wordpeace, February 2026​
A teacher reflects on a former undocumented student whose dreams, opportunities, and sense of belonging were slowly erased by legal barriers until even her voice disappeared.​
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"At My Daughter’s Basketball Practice"
January House, March 2026​
At a children’s basketball practice, one boy learns the game isn’t about the ball. It’s about how badly you’re told to want it.​
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"Bedtime Routine"
South Florida Poetry Journal (SoFloPoJo), [Forthcoming May 2026]​
A speaker raised amid nightly chaos leaves home only to confront a suffocating darkness that follows them across decades until they learn to push back against it.​
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"Spellbound: A Student Recites Sexton"
English Journal, [Forthcoming March 2026]​
A student’s raw, trembling recitation of Anne Sexton transforms a classroom into a sacred space, haunting her peers with truths they didn’t know they carried.
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January House, March 2026​
As his mother’s memory begins to fold in on itself, paper birds become the only way her past can still find its way home.​
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"Agualungs"
South Florida Poetry Journal (SoFloPoJo), [Forthcoming May 2026]​
A speaker with failing lungs reflects on inherited breath and mortality as a doctor’s casual song reference blurs language, legacy, and the inescapable weight of family illness.​
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"Costume Jewelry"
Last Leaves Magazine, [Forthcoming May 2026]​
A granddaughter reflects on her grandmother’s beloved, much-judged ring—once dismissed as cheap but cherished as an heirloom—and now watches its emotional weight pass to her own daughter.
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"Lunar Degeneration"
JMWW Magazine, [Forthcoming May 2026]​
A meditation on how memory, like the moon, carries lasting scars from impacts and reflects borrowed light even as emptiness sets in.​
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"Where I Am Home"
The Musezine Magazine, [Forthcoming]​
A child recalls lying in a cornfield yearning to escape, only to realize that home, like a scarecrow rooted in soil, binds them to place and prevents release.​
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