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
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.
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Hobart, May 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.
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Rattle: Poets Respond, October 2025
Live reading on Rattlecast
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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Rattle: Ekphrastic Challenge, October 2025
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*Editor's Choice*
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.
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Sky Island Journal, Issue 33 (2025)
A tense encounter at a bus stop reveals the thin veil between predator and prey, as two strangers—both wolf and sheep—silently assess each other’s threat and vulnerability.
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Maudlin House Journal, March 2025
More Poems
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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Sage Cigarettes Magazine, Vol. 3, Issue 1 (2025)
The poem celebrates the transformative power of teachers and mentors, portraying them as not just beacons of light but as flames that ignite others, encouraging growth, knowledge, and purpose.
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Teach. Write. Literary Journal, Spring 2025
The poem evokes childhood memories of warmth and familiarity, where worn-out objects and dim light formed a fragile sanctuary against the restless world outside.
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The Eunoia Review, April 2025
This is an ekphrastic poem based on the painting pictured below about the loneliness of routine, the search for belonging, and the realization that while we wait for others, no one may be waiting for us. After Early Sunday Morning (1930) by Edward Hopper
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Willawaw Journal, Issue 20 (2025)
The poem captures the deep insecurity and self-doubt writers feel when their work is met with confusion, as well as the internal battle between seeking clarity and fearing an even harsher response.
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Teach. Write. Literary Journal, Spring 2025
The poem examines how familiarity can dull our sense of wonder, yet in rare moments of clarity, we rediscover the beauty once taken for granted and regain our appreciation.
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Down in the Dirt Magazine, Vol. 231 (2025)
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*Selected for Scars Publications' Annual Anthology*
A grandson reflects on his grandfather’s humble faith, quiet strength, and enduring legacy—symbolized not by grandeur or ritual, but by a threadbare gold ring. The poem had to use the words: cherry tree, surveillance, and menu.
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3Elements Literary Review, Issue 48 (2025), pp. 48-49.
A haunting meditation on fear, instinct, and silence. The poem follows a night-shift guard who kills an unidentifiable creature in the dark, then rationalizes the act as routine, never naming what he saw—or what he became.​​
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Sacramento Literary Review, October 2025
"Spellbound: A Student Recites Sexton"
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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English Journal, [Forthcoming]
A man reflects on the generational labor and sacrifice of his coal-working, wood-splitting forefathers that allowed him to break free, earn an education, and build a gentler life for his children—yet he still carries their legacy in his scarred hands and memory.
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Bubble Tea Literary, December 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 speaker revisits a decaying childhood home overtaken by nature, where memory and vegetation entwine into a haunting, predatory force that consumes the past.​​
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Unleash Lit Press, October 2025
"Shed"
A speaker confronts their fractured identity after a toxic relationship, shedding the physical and emotional remnants of another’s influence to reclaim a self that is raw, uncertain, and wholly their own.
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Unleash Lit Press, October 2025
The poem "root system" portrays a surreal transformation. The piece suggests disconnection from nature, displacement, and the quiet yearning for groundedness or belonging in a world that's shifting or abandoning its roots.
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Scaffold Literary Magazine, August 2025
A speaker seeking reckoning at a secluded pond is confronted by a shape-shifting bird that delivers a paradoxical verdict—guilty of not suffering enough—revealing the unresolved weight of past wounds and unmet accountability.
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Unleash Lit Press, October 2025
The poem captures the numbing normalization of gun violence and tragedy in modern life, where routine and distraction mask a growing sense of helplessness and emotional disconnection.
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Pinhole Poetry Journal, Vol. 4, Issue 2 (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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Not One of Us Magazine, Vol. 83 (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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Down in the Dirt Magazine, Vol. 232 (2025)
This poem asserts that embracing one's flaws and vulnerability through art is an act of courageous self-acceptance, where imperfection becomes the truest form of wholeness.
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The Ekphrastic Review, July 2025
"Sponges"
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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The Drift & Dribble Miscellany, October 2025
The poem delves into a childhood fascination with a mysterious tree that later becomes a symbol of enduring wounds and the speaker’s unspoken duty to tend to them.​​​​
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Trampoline: A Journal of Poetry, Vol. 27.10A (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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Amethyst Review, September 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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LowLife Lit Press, May 2025
The poem reclaims the concept of disability as a personal and powerful identity—one not defined by limitation or pity, but by resilience, beauty, and self-determination.
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FLARE Magazine, Issue 4 (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, Issue 1 (2025)
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This poem mourns the fading hunting traditions of a family farm, where the absent figures of relatives now linger only as ghostly memories among the trees.
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San Antonio Review, [Forthcoming]
A man grapples with betrayal and emotional distance in a failing relationship, comparing his unraveling to Ty Cobb’s sharpened aggression—violent, legendary, and ultimately abandoned.
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The SportScribe, Issue 1 (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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Five Fleas Itchy Poetry., 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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Little Old Lady Comedy Magazine, September 2025
This prose poem portrays a father confronting his failing body through haunting images of a thrift-store chest and a dollhouse, as he struggles to answer his daughter’s innocent question about his illness while facing the inevitable.
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Unbroken: Prose Poems, October 2025
"Where I Am Home"
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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The Musezine Magazine, [Forthcoming]
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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horror senryu 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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Cold Moon Journal, September 2025
A father, grappling with the ethics of presidential luxury deals abroad, filters his doubts through the innocent, disarming logic of his daughter, who reminds him that asking questions is still the right thing to do.
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New Verse News, May 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 Grove"
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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Wild Roof Journal, [Forthcoming]
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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4LPH4NUM3R1C, November 2025
"Costume Jewelry"
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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Last Leaves Magazine, [Forthcoming]
A grandson recalls his grandparents’ contrasting loves through colors—learning that love, like a field of flowers, is what remains after loss and what cannot be kept.
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New Feathers Anthology, December 2025
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"Hope Was a Thing with Papers"
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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Wordpeace, [Forthcoming]
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