Poet // Professor of English // Teaching Artist
Poems
Three Poems from The Familiar
from Alice Says Go Fuck Yourself (Agape Editions)
"For days my extraordinary self watches clouds at dawn /
move across the sky. She waits to die, to be changed /
into something better than this"
Three Poems
from STAT®REC
"Perhaps you are like the rabbit /
outside the fence, trembling in place, /
having just escaped the hound’s /
frustrated advances. You blend /
with the dark like the rabbit’s hide /
blends with the tree’s bark.
Stay /
very still and perhaps the dreams /
won’t find you."
Why Our Mothers Panic
from The Southern Review, Spring 2012 and Verse Daily, September 2012
"On days like this, her head is not a skull filled with networked matter, /
its own system of fences and walls built up and torn down over time. /
It is an empty cavern sleeved with hanging bats"
What Has Been, What Cannot Be
from The Bear Review
"There will be
no bended knee from me, no,
not even when the daffodils nod
their gaudy crowns, expecting
supplication. I cannot pray or plea
when everything is broken."
We Eviscerate What We Love
from Tahoma Literary Review
"A rabbit lies belly open on the kitchen floor, / its glassy eyes refracting lamp light,
viscera spilling onto tile. I read /
its warm pink innards like tea leaves
before trying to lift the open envelope /of its body in my hands and out the door."
A Woman, Split
from Stirring: A Literary Collection, Volume 16, Ed. 5
"Now imagine I am three.
Not the tree. Instead,
a totem made of flesh
beneath a wooden sky:
my many fingers spin
the thread of possible lives."
What Our Mothers Know as Love
from The Gettysburg Review, Summer 2012
"his mother sees the fear leaping from him like flecks of foam: /
it is more than a squeal ringing in her ears; it is a throbbing in her intestine, /
a pulse that makes her run back and forth, wailing."
Dust and
Empty Words
from The Bear Review
"Now their yellow leaves /
and limp or brittle stalks remind you/
of the jaundiced, passed-out men slumped/
behind the wheels of cars in the pub parking lot./
There they waited for dawn or death to end/
their slow withdrawal."
My Heart, Not Hers (And Not Hers Either)
"If not for Buffalo Wild Wings and their extra large beers, /
my husband might have divorced my extraordinary self /
right at the airport. A man traveling with the least wise /
version of his wife needs a drink, or two, or three, /
because she will test all of his versions."
A Woman
"By sunset, I am a creature sucking greedily / on the last light of day. I eat and eat, and yet
I am always hungry, and my children are always hungry."