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.
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.
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*
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
"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.
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.
Willawaw Journal. April 2025
A solitary commuter waits for a bus and realizes he may be waiting for connection and love that never arrives.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
horror senryu journal, September 2025
The poem transforms the mechanical rhythm of a drill into a dark music that drowns out human pain.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
Cold Moon Journal, September 2025
This poem captures the image of a decayed walnut whose hollowed interior has soured, evoking transience and rot.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Blue Rivers, 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.
Live Reading: July 25, 2026 at 12 p.m. EST
"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.
"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.
"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.
Live Reading: May 25, 2026 at 7:30 p.m. EST
"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.
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.
"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.
Live Reading: May 25, 2026 at 7:30 p.m. EST
"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.
"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.
"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.