Poem Selected as Finalist in the 2011 Third Coast Poetry Prize

I am pleased to announce that my poem "On Thunderstorms" was selected as a finalist in the 2011 Third Coast Poetry Prize judged by Natasha Trethewey.

Poems Published in West Branch

I am pleased to say that my poems "Drinking Stories" and "The Same Idea" have both been accepted for publication in West Branch. Again, due to my busy schedule, I do not have the time to update the poems to the blogsite at this time, however, I do hope to get them up as soon as I can.

Poems Published in Prairie Schooner

I am pleased to announce that Prairie Schooner has accepted for publication my poems "Hounds" and "Working First Shift at the Progresso Soups Factory."

At the moment, I am busy working on several projects, but once I get a chance I will post both poems up for you to read.

Poem Published in Cold Mountain Review

The Pecking Order


I

Steps from the chain link fence, schoolboys
shove each other below the schoolyard magnolia.
They pelt the runs of pale flowers
spotting the stocky limbs, use fallen pine cones
and rocks and lumps of loose asphalt to pick off
and drop the tree's stubby seed pods.
They split the gathered shells and pocket
the red kernels hidden inside
like lost marbles. No one asks why they do it,
no one counts the dropped or split husks.
They just follow the play some boy started,
yell and fight because someone else did.
They try to seem bigger than they actually are.
They forget what the teachers say
and step over the magnolia blossoms
scattered among the knobby roots like birdseed.


II

Whether they remember or are curious again, C.G. and Ruth Byrd ask Victor Recondo
_____about how he knows Jerry Vines.
We're brothers, he says. That's right--you're brothers, they respond. They do this because
the whole retirement home whispers about this, and are restless with the answer.
_____The Byrds, like every other resident, believe the pair is something
like a married couple; they look over Victor for his "brother's" family looks, but find
nothing to allow what they say to be. They grapple the queer lisp of his Spanish tongue
_____against Jerry's Manhattan-speak,
they compliment his diamond-freckled pinky rings. They inquire, We hear Jerry
_____gets cafeteria takeaway for the both of you, carries it back in a basket.
Jerry brings me a picnic dinner every day, Victor returns. They Byrds and the retirement home
are left with this, whether or not they are restless. Victor tells them they are brothers,
_____and it is different from the salad days. Victor and Jerry take the questions
_____and whispering tenets with their picnic dinner.


III

This is how I heard it. Run off the road, my uncle's
boyfriend in the drainage gulley, barely breathing, the officer

parked beside the curled guard rail and muddied ditch.
My Uncle Darren held Carlos by kneeling behind him

and draping his arms across his heaving chest.
This is what the trooper saw of the two men;

he called in an ambulance for my uncle's boyfriend,
asthma attack; he whispered over his radio to the dispatcher,

said he suspected alcohol or foul play. Carlos
belted to the stretcher, hospital bound--the officer walked

back to the scene, and my uncle ready with questions
and how-is-he-doing's. The trooper fired back

with the sobriety line and tests and further inquiries;
he yelled at my sobbing uncle, "Stop it, goddamn it.

You got no right to hear about him. Stop bitching,
you faggot chicken-shit." Tired of his cries,

the officer wrestled my whimpering uncle
into the backseat; he stepped on the shard of windshield

and car pieces sown along the field ditch and soft shoulder.
"I got no choice, but to take you with me,"

he said to my uncle. "You brought this on you.
You must have been on something."

Poem Published in The Pinch

"Milford Sound" was selected to be published in the Summer 2011 issue of The Pinch. This piece is one from a series of poems centered around my travels in New Zealand.

I hope to have this poem up for your reading pleasure in the near feature, but due to semester obligations (once again) I will be unable to post it at this time.

Poem Published in The Greensboro Review

"The Root Whiskers" was selected to be published in the Spring 2011 issue of The Greensboro Review. This piece is one from a series of poems centered around my travels in New Zealand.

I hope to have this poem up for your reading pleasure in the near feature, but due to semester obligations (once again) I will be unable to post it at this time.

Poem Published in South Carolina Review

His Grandmother as a Wind Chime
-for Julia Brewin, August 29, 1928-September 1, 2006


The grandmother can't help dragging her kidney-
colored housecoat on the Dalmatian shag carpet,
her short legs like onionskin, her hair a shrub

thinning in fall. She can't help the army of candles
on her marble cake, the bruises, needle pricks
and scars on her fingers, or that she passes away

in her sleep three days after her birthday, her grandson
crying, a year old, crawling head first into a coffee table
as his parents empty hangers and closets,

vacuum rugs, trash jars of potpourri from the pink
and green bathrooms, unhook and pack up
the prized wind chimes that clanged by the side door

where she'd sit and clean cornsilk and husks from cobs
of Silver Queen and Jersey Sweet. The old house sells,
and the tinny clammer of chimes sings in a new kitchen

as the grandson mouths words and sounds
from his highchair, his mother baby-talking to him,
"Hear that, honey? That's Mom-mom talking to you.

Say 'Hi, Mom-mom!'" By the time the grandson
is naming objects--laundry bins and diaper boxes--
his parents tuck him in his crib, and years later, ask him,

"Did you say goodnight to Mom-mom? Go say
'Goodnight.' Ask her for good dreams." He totters out
of his room, kneels beneath the wind chimes and whispers.

And the grandson believes the raw metal tubes,
the knotted thread and steel loops are the body of his lost
grandmother, croon to him throughout the day,

knell approval at the sight of crayon sketches--a boy
perched beside a wreath of ringing pipes. During art class
at the kindergarten and elementary school, he sculpts

modeling clay into snakes and little hammers, comes home
on the bus to a snack of grapes, a backdrop of soft gongs
and tolls, his mother declaring, "There she goes

again! I swear your grandmother only makes a peep
when you're here!" He gets dropped off
at the middle school early so he can raise the state flag

outside the main office, stays after for band practice
where he plays the vibraphone and sits first chair. At night,
he has dreams of swinging, strings and cords hugging him,

his limbs hollow rods, his mouth a ringing bell.

Travis Mossotti's poem "Decampment" now a Short Film

I am pleased to announce that a friend of mine, Travis Mossotti (of Saxifrage Press), had his beautiful poem "Decampment" transformed into a brilliant short film directed by his brother, Josh Mossotti. The artistry of the written/spoken word and the landscape that is created is a brilliant pairing. Congratulation to the brothers.

For the rest of you, check out Decampment.

Poem Published in North American Review

Scrap Iron


We hunted for steel along flat-bottom train rails--glass
_____blanketing the gravel track bed like chickenfeed,
jimsonweed weed stalks between creosote-steeped timbers--
_____picked over buckled trailers and garbage stacks:
cracked pump heads, mower blades, band saws rusted mid-cut.
_____The clang of spikes and bolt heads lobbed into a bucket
was a lesson he taught me in milking the wasted land.

Those days were oil tanks chain-dragged home
_____on the city road; rotting doors charred in our backyard
so that I could rake the hinges and metal from the ash.
_____Those days were broken appliances I held down
while he tore off the unwanted plastic and rubber gaskets.

Evenings, my father exhausted the fridge's thirty-rack
_____one beer at a time and reviewed the math of cents per pound
as I swatted away drones that hummed from wasps' nests
_____in the trashed air conditioner's A-coil, in and out
of the mouths of empties I crumpled under my heel.
_____I refastened the flapping sole of hand-me-down boots
with screws plundered from a pool scrubber head.
_____The tiny spirals shined in my palm like loose change.

His long weekends off and the truck bed crammed full, wreck
_____balanced and roped, we drove across town to cash in.
"Don't let them see you when we get weighted on the drive in,"
_____he warned me, balled below te glove box, hiding under
work shirts and newspapers, palms cupped over mouth
_____masking my breathing until we made the junkyard's jagged heap.

Knowing that we'd make an extra forty-five bucks if I
_____wasn't in the truck during weight out, I snuck
my way around the hissing hydraulic compactors, hustled past
_____the growling machines and grease-tanned forklift drivers.
I kept my hands in my pockets and thought about what was worse:
_____if one of the dump workers found me, or the look on my father's
face if they did--how if I didn't get caught, my body
_____an extra hundred and twenty some pounds of scrap.

Poem Published in Quiddity

I am pleased to say that my poem "Palace Depression" is going to be published in the latest issue of Quiddity out of Benedictine University in Springfield, Illinois. Besides this, I am to record an audio file of me reading my poem, and will have it played on the NPR station out of that college. Whenever the file/link is available, I will include it in a future post. Thank you.

Poem Published in The Labletter

Standing in the Atlantic Ocean with Tesla's Pigeon


I'm buttoned up in midnight's jacket, star-glow
pinpricking the pitch black. Foam ribbons along the water's edge.
Warped pilings splinter lightning rods. Walking into the ocean,
wavechurn belting my waist, I squint into the six inches
I can see around me and watch the chalky smudge
of the milky way loose itself against the flash of a coming storm
tucked up against the horizon. The sea flickers its offering back,

and a smack of jellyfish rises to the surface. A yawn of tentacles.
Umbrellas with no wires. Suddenly plugged-in, the soft bells twinkle on,
a riddle of light doubling as the sky's reflection--bioluminescence.
And as I see them glimmer on like bulbs in streetlight globes
it's with the same awe as when Nikola Tesla stared at lampposts
erected like bookends on ever New York City block
and watched Edison's filaments ignite with his alternating current.

Eighty-six and skeletal, still a fine figure in a three piece pinstripe,
he picked wads of bread crusts out of his pockets,
walked up 35th to 5th Avenue. He sowed dinner crumbs by the curbside
for pigeons. The neat split of his hair down the middle. His ears
perked to neon's buzz and traffic din; energy chugging
through the city's veins set him in a trance. The whole earth
struck him like a tuning fork. In that sounding tone, Tesla remembered

how electricity's pulse felt coursing through his body:
the itch under his skin as he allowed jolting limbs from his coil
to crackle and hum for miles and kindle the flickering tongue
inside of him. The wound copper and pipe--a mushroom cap of metal
pinned over a stem of cords. On the opposite side
of his study, the distant thunder of his sparking machine lit beacons
in his hand, unattached to any gadget. Lifted power from the open air.

Swooping into room 3327 from the nest of leaves and twine
on the window ledge, Tesla's pigeon--the one he said he loved
as a man loves a woman--perched at his feet. Gray wingtips.
Fluorescent white. He believed it spoke through its eyes, beams of light,
powerful, dazzling, greater than any lamp in his laboratory.
He stared into the burning ink-drop pupils and dreamed a whole flock
followed in and speckled his suite white, a glinting chorus. Their bulbs

like the stars, like the jellyfish circling around me, the lightning blazing
a midpoint in the stretching dark. All of the other details blur together:
constellations curving overhead and rolling out in front,
the gleaming blooms beneath, and the stars' watery echo.
I reach into both heavens, my skin aware of itself,
waiting for the arc of electricity from that storm to pierce
my body and flip a switch, spark whatever it is inside of me to flash--

enamel and bone and hair, now phosphorescent. Did Tesla want light
to beam from his eye sockets? Maybe man is enamored
with the sweetness of mirroring the cosmic, and--despite how fragile
and broken we are--is able to glow. I hope there is a morsel
of cinder in all of us. And when every candlewick is snuffed out,
when every light goes cold, I'll blink the only way I know how,
the earth's clamoring resonance, my crude refrain lost in the endless pitch.

Poems Published in Milk Money

"Bivalve, Cumberland County" and "By the Margin of Water" were selected to be published in Milk Money Volume Eight, When Jeff Goldblum Speaks, We Listen.

I hope to have these poems up for your reading pleasure in the near feature, but due to the start of the semester (my teaching and class taking obligations) I will be unable to get them up.

Prose Poem Published in Poet Lore

Midnight Shift

I knew what the power plant kept from the house. Two in the morning, my mother would nudge me awake and carry me on her hip into the master bedroom. My father's side of the mattress looked bare. The alarm's red numbers scarred the opposite wall from the mirror hung above the headboard and the turn-dial television blinked in the corner. A preacher was on channel five, waving a green handkerchief with gold trim. He promised the swatches of material cured arthritis and sickness, healed wounds and brought money to a broken home. His faint whooping and laughing kept me stirring though my mother curled over on her side and fell asleep, a man's voice humming through the house. I got up to switch on the ceiling fan, crawled to the knob, searched the stations but settled back on the preacher's infomercial. It looked like a flood had slicked and pinned back his hair. If I had enough cord to walk the telephone receiver next to the screen, I would have called my father to ask him if he lit the lamps in that church. If I had enough cord, I would have dialed the number to have the holy man pray for my father's machine-crushed hands, his missing fingers.

Poem Selected as Honorable Mention for the Academy of American Poets Prize 2010

"Jersey Devil" was selected as honorable mention for the Academy of American Poets Prize judged by Maurice Manning. Brenna Lemiuex was selected as winner of the prize, and Hannah Katie New was also selected as an honorable mention.

Poems Published in Los Angeles Review

Jersey Devil

"Struggling to survive with twelve children, [Mother Leeds]
became distraught when she realized that yet another addition
to her overburdened family was on the way. Cursing her
hopelessness, she cried out in disgust, 'I am tired of children!
Let it be a devil!'"

- James F. McCloy & Robert Miller, Jr., The Jersey Devil


Whenever the ruddy dusk swallows the sandwash, the barrens,
children fed on devil stories tramp the woods' footpaths.
They shoulder branches whittled to spears and prowl
the rock shore, wade into bog shoals and back--legs stained
from the creek ore and much. From rickety forts,
they map and raid the scrubland. They palm knives,
scour the treeline and timber shanties, ramble home
toting their marsh-blackened boots. The children peak
through curtain gaps during summer downpours,
play lookout from the covered porch--this is how they keep
the family mutt from slaughter. They wrestle the stream-
snagged lure with the thought: it's him. The wild thing
that snakes along the forked river as the brave

plunge from the dock ledge into rusty water.
The shadow that buries its hoof trail under pine needles
skirting abandoned deer stands. The savage who loses
its wing-scrape and forked tail in the windchurned oak boughs.
And when night paws at the window, the light-empty bedroom
fakes the creature's black-jack lair, dreams flash
the mud-padded fur coarse as bark, wild fangs like a jaw of briars.
Mothers and fathers wake at the sound of their own
sharp gasps, bawl and whine the Jersey Devil hunts for them.
The children light house lamps at the same black hour,
sweet-talk and shoo away the wicked. They stare beyond
the glass-pane and drapes, the yard fence like a band of teeth,
and wonder if they are already tucked in the beast's belly.




From These Split Ends
-for Jessica Keough


After I proposed marriage, we decided
to start cutting each others' hair.

First time, I was drunk on vodka tonics
and used poultry shears, but she trusted me

enough to score off a few inches.
We did it standing in the apartment's

old cast iron tub, naked, my hands trembling.
Her curls made it difficult. The blades

didn't trim right, and I strained to snip each lock.
While inspecting the workmanship,

I dropped the shear, nicked her ankle.
I forget how exactly she reacted, but it was calm--

something of a soft glance down.
As I palmed the clutch of her strands,

worried over the neat horizon of her cut,
her manner suggested to me, there is time to get better.

Split ends in the wastebasket. Her right arm
over her breasts. I brushed off a lone hair

perched on the crook of her arm
and offered my hand to ferry her out of the bath.