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, 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.
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*Ekphrastic Challenge--Editor's Choice*
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.​
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
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.
More Poems
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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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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​"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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​"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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​"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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Down in the Dirt Magazine, May 2025​​​
Familiarity dims the moon’s wonder until a quiet unexpected glimpse restores its quiet magnificence.​
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*Selected for Scars Publications' Annual Anthology*
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"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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"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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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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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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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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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.
"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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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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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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​"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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​"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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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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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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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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​"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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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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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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​"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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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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​"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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​"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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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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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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"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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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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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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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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"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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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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"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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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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"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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"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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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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"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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"The Fish Tank Hours"
Blue Rivers, [Forthcoming]​
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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"Repurposed"
The Muleskinner Journal, [Forthcoming]​
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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"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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"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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