Writer

I recently won first place in the summer, 2025 kid lit centric poetry contest held by the Lyrical Language Lab. They designed this lovely graphic featuring my poem:

My poetry has also been featured in several literary journals and e-magazines, including in “Fire Season” and “The Nether Side of Narrative” in The Journal of Formal Poetry, and “The Last Rehearsal” in The Rising Phoenix Review.

The Last Rehersal

The day before they closed the world we danced
The blues across the sunset into night
Because when darkness falls, you take your chance

Amongst the stars, to slide and look askance
At folding dreams and yesterday’s delights.
The day before they closed the world, we danced

To scratchy 45’s, the closed hold stance
Of ninety years ago discharged aright,
Because, when darkness falls, you take your chance

With recreated steps and circumstance,
To say as other generations might,
“The day before they closed the world, we danced,”

And fix yourself amidst astral expanse
Of other “days before” in other nights.
But know, once darkness lifts, you take your chance

That lesser dawns bring lesser happenstance.
We knew but didn’t know. We tripped the light.
We folded dreams. We closed the world. We danced.
We followed as the darkness fell to chance.

Fire Season in California

When August births September parched and spare
amidst the bronzing of the chaparral
look west. Look west, for there hibisci burst
in canker reds and oozing pinks from beds
where once reclined the stars, while down below
the algae echo bloom for crimson bloom
across a warming sea. For flowers do
as flowers do, no matter how waters
divide: they blush and thrive, consume and die,
in parasitic loop. If in the east
their grasping roots reduce their host to ash,
and September wanders mad amongst
the oaken ghosts of August past, look west.
Look west to where the flowers bloom and ask
what price hibiscus.

The Nether Side of Narrative

A story:

In Baltimore a salesman died young,
Abandoning three sons amidst Great Wars
And Great Depressions. Up and out they hied,
Into a world that met them stride for stride,
So sons could wealthy walk where fathers climbed,
And grandsons might so lofty live they must
Look down to see a world well conquered.

And so it was.

But also:

One hundred years ago, a woman raised
Three boys. The house, we’re told, was small but had
A staircase, demonstrating where she’d like
To go from here. Beyond that, it seems
She generated spontaneously,
Pasteur be damned, upon the stoop, in time
To birth three sons, who then she loosed upon
An unsuspecting world in the manner
Of Pandora. We must assume, somewhere
‘Twixt Kennedy and Carter, she retired
To the nether side of narrative, because
The rest is silence.

Still, she endured within the warp and woof
Of masculine existence, between sons,
As they strive, and the daughters that those sons
Deride, to the sons of sons who walk
With girls crawling, sick, behind, to the grandsons
Looking down, should they ever bother
Looking down, upon the subastral realms
Of the family’s disregarded.

One hundred years ago, in Baltimore,
A woman’s husband died. He left behind
Three boys, and a set of stairs not meant for her.
She raised her sons accordingly.
The rest is