A selection of my published work. I’ll likely swap out pieces from time to time.

Now It Can Be Told

What happened then is napkins on the floor, each day dying 
on its own tiny hill. I was my cravings: better posture

steadier aim and the power to sense you entering the room until 
starting over again meant tindering a fire from ashes.

Planes took off never to land again. We gossiped about neighbors 
pulled off the street and thrown into windowless vans.

You taught me to look first at a man’s shoes, then his shirt collar. You slipped
the last roadblock by disguising yourself as a mirror.

Bruises come and go without reason at our age. I forget why traffic lights 
are those colors and whether you were comrade or lover, test case 

or ill-concealed warning sent by spies 
with smiles like stomped-out campfires.

Originally published in The Shore

***

Something that Lay Under the Sun

up from the earth
with both hands

the sarcasm of birds
the moon’s question mark

brushing away soil
trace the exhumed hide

open the palate
to a parade of microbes

the taste of life
at war with itself

leave a new wound
atop an old scar

the spent flesh duly honored
the sun at last answered

Originally published in Routes Between Raindrops

***

A Horizon Falls Somewhere Between Hypothesis and Hope

horizons are a guessing game
earth and sky swap hues
mingling, mischievous

the tracks of a rabbit
cross the scrawl of eagle’s talons

turned-up earth and beating wing 
in sudden embrace with the heavens

we reach for them secure
knowing they can never be touched

Originally published in Poetry South

***

Trilobite, Dissected

our world is maps laid over maps
chapters of fossils with lost endings

rivers making chimes of stones
drown us in language

open ribcages, pygidia abandoned
meals gone extinct

we are passed hand to hand
a grip that never fully surrenders

memories of sediment
a page of shale, a sheet of slate

in the layer cake of eons
I am exactly here — pressed between 

the second evolution of wings
and the first mouth to speak god 
as a verb

===

Pygidium (pl. pygidia): The posterior body part of certain arthropod species, as well as the extinct trilobite.

Originally published in *82 Review