Hello there! 

I thought by way of introduction, I’d share a handful of my own poems that span a wide range of themes and forms. Naturally, as most poets, I let the work speak for itself. 

Quills

 Today a man pressed a pillow

over his 7-month-old son’s face,

then strangled the baby’s mother

(who was also his 16-year-old daughter),

called his mother, confessed,

then drove out into the woods and shot

himself in the cab of his pickup.

A porcupine waddles through a field

not far from my house. I’ve never fired

a round at anything not glass or tin,

but the summer after my mother loaded

me on a plane to go live with my father

was spent nailing earthworms to 2x4s

leaned along the backyard fence.

Hammer thwacks echoed off the shed

as morning haze ghosted

through surrounding pines. The worms

writhed as I pierced their skin,

blood and shit smeared the boards,

the crucified bodies dried and curled

under the sun my parents both shared.

The pain we receive, the little it takes

to give it tenfold. I won’t measure evil

out of units of illness and despair,

but while the porcupine munches

on clover, I’ll rest on a stone wall,

allow the sun to burn my neck red,

my hands finally at peace in my lap.

Originally published in The Massachusetts Review

November Praise

The smell of ferns and understory

after rain. The tick, tick, of stove,

flame under kettle. Bing Crosby,

and not just the Christmas records.

Cooking meat slowly off the bone,

and every kind of soup and stew.

To come this close to nostalgia,

but go no further, leaving behind

the boy who wore loneliness

like boots too big for his feet.

That time of evening,

when everything turns blue

in moonlight, when darkness

has yet to consume all for itself.

Originally published in Nine Mile Magazine

Okay, okay, okay. I know I said I’d let the poems speak for themselves, but for this next poem I need to state the following: The first section of my most recent book, The Bastard Children of Dharma Bums, consists of a series of poems that are sculpted poems, essentially erasure poems without the erased lines, taken from each chapter of Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums. I manipulate the lines, punctuation, and in some cases, the tense of a word, changing “broke” to “break,” for an example, but otherwise the words within each poem are as they fall within Kerouac’s novel. Here is one of those poems:

The Bastard Children of Dharma Bums #34

Raspberry Jell-O in the setting sun

poured through unimaginable craigs.

Rose-tint hope—brilliant and bleak.

Ice fields and snow raging mad.

I read snowy air and woodsmoke.

The wind dark, clouds forge.

The sing in my stovepipe absorbs

vaster, darker storm closing in

like a surl of silence. No starvation

turmoiling. My shadow the rainbow

I haloed. Your life a raindrop.

I stood in rose dusk, meditated

in half-moon thunder.

My mother’s love drenching rains

washed and washed.

I called Han Shan in the mountains.

I called Han Shan in morning fog.

I closed my eyes, yelled dark wild

down in my garbage pit.

My hair long in the mirror.

My skin soaking pristine light.

My fire roaring. I hear the radio

singing, She was the wind

which passes through everything.

Birds rejoicing sweet blueberries

for the last time. Sitting, I twisted

real life and cried cascades

answering the meditation bell.

I know desolation.

I owe gritty love back to this world.

These last two poems that I leave you with are from my first collection of poems, Break Every String. I hope you’ve enjoyed these poems and look forward to reading future essays, reviews, and interviews with other contemporary poets. 

Snow Angels

Each night they stare into the sky

and wonder why even with wings

they can never get off the ground.

Good reason for their creator 

to take three steps, cock his head 

and disown his gift to the world. 

Abandonment: a likely origin of anyone’s 

lack of faith. And faith: precisely what’s needed 

to soar in the purple abyss of winter. 

We step out into our lives like sun slicing 

between buildings and perform this one angelic 

act that melts from our consciousness.

We return to our houses to accomplish

something important, leaving behind

the ones who don’t know any better,

who see the wings as open arms, 

snow as flesh, and are willing to lie back down.

Born in the USA

 We were pumping our fists with Springsteen,

chanting the chorus as Reagan galloped 

the campaign trail, still pretending 

to be a cowboy, and the old man who lived 

in the blue house with the white fence 

lined with rosebushes was handing out mints 

from a bowl made out of a buffalo skull. 

Uncle Bob chopped off his thumbs 

in a metal press on his first day on the job. 

My father returned to Khe Sahn sleepwalking 

past our bedrooms, shouting out the names 

of smoke and moon. He had a woman he loved 

in Saigon, sang The Boss. Across the bay—

Ferris wheel lights and roller coaster screams. 

Child Services found my grandmother unfit 

to adopt. An ambulance in front of the blue house 

with the white fence lined with rosebushes. 

A white sheet. The bones and feathers 

of a dead seagull—a ship wreck 

on a rocky shore lapped by green waves. 

On their lunch break, my father, my uncles, 

and both my grandfathers, their names 

embroidered on their grease-stained shirts, 

stepped out of the factory and coughed up 

their paychecks to their wives idling in Regals, 

Novas, and Gremlins. Out by the gas fires

of the refinery. My father’s handlebar mustache 

terrified me. My brother built me castles 

out of blankets and chairs, larger than the house 

that confined them. Taught me how to leap 

off the couch like Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka,

how to moonwalk and breakdance. He’d go on

to teach me that disappointment’s a carcinogen.

My father took cover behind the Lay-Z-boy

in his underwear. My grandmother offered 

a pregnant runaway a place to stay in exchange 

for her baby. When the plant relocated to Mexico, 

my father brought home a pink slip heavier 

than a Huey Hog. The rosebushes became thorny 

switches. Over ham steaks and mashed potatoes, 

our parents poured out their divorce.

We had to decide who we wanted to live 

with before leaving the table. I’d go

wherever my brother went: that meant Mom. 

My father took a job out of state. 

My mother took a boyfriend, who

dragged his unemployment into a bar 

called The Pit, then staggered

into our house knocking over houseplants,

and I was the one ordered to clean 

the carpets with the wet/dry vac. We’d sneak 

out of the house at 3AM to swim 

in the neighbor’s pool, or ping rocks 

off hurtling freight trains. The city condemned 

the blue house with the paint-chipped fence. 

My mother’s eye, blackened. We slept in parks, 

better than home. She stood at the sink, 

sobbed, scrubbed blood-splotches

out of her white jacket with a soapy sponge. 

Wouldn’t press charges. My brother bought 

a dime bag and a revolver from a guy named Kool-Aid. 

My mother was crowned a welfare queen, and drove 

a Cadillac assembled out of political mythology. 

I smoked my first joint on the roof of a movie theater

with my brother and the stars. An after-school ritual: 

stepping over the passed-out boyfriend to grab 

a Coke out of the fridge. We spray-painted 

gang insignias across the boarded-up windows 

of the blue house with splintered teeth. The boyfriend 

could whip up one hell of an omelet. We didn’t hate 

him on Sunday mornings. My mother’s stiches. 

We swiped a bottle of Mad Dog, drank it while eating 

peanut butter & jelly sandwiches. My mother stashed 

bottles of gin in the leather boots my father bought 

for their last Christmas together. Twice they called 

me into the principal’s office because a knife fell out 

of my pocket at recess. We turned abandoned factories 

into playgrounds, busted out the windows with tornadic rage.

Somebody was asking for it, and somebody was going to get it. 

I overheard a teacher tell my mother, “He’s going to grow up 

to kill somebody.” Thanks to the Black Panthers, 

this white boy had free breakfast at school. 

My brother waited until the boyfriend was drunk 

on the toilet to burst in swinging a baseball bat. 

Later that night while taking a bath, I fished 

out a tooth biting me in the ass. Backhoes 

and bulldozers devoured the blue house 

with the collapsing roof. We rewound

and played back the catastrophic loss 

that plumed over Cape Canaveral 

on our VCRs. The boyfriend slammed 

a stolen van into a tree. She’d pour me

a bowl of Cheerios, pour herself a Scotch.

The boyfriend’s dentist kept good records. 

“I’m sending you to your father.” 

Son don’t you understand now? Front-page news:

firefighters dousing the mangled inferno. 

Got in a little hometown jam.  

I stood before a judge, pled guilty to 

shoplifting Christmas lights, the kind that twinkle. 

SMG’s ‘Are We Here Yet’?

Hello there! 

I thought by way of introduction, I’d share a handful of my own poems that span a wide range of themes and forms. Naturally, as most poets, I let the work speak for itself. 

Quills

 Today a man pressed a pillow

over his 7-month-old son’s face,

then strangled the baby’s mother

(who was also his 16-year-old daughter),

called his mother, confessed,

then drove out into the woods and shot

himself in the cab of his pickup.

A porcupine waddles through a field

not far from my house. I’ve never fired

a round at anything not glass or tin,

but the summer after my mother loaded

me on a plane to go live with my father

was spent nailing earthworms to 2x4s

leaned along the backyard fence.

Hammer thwacks echoed off the shed

as morning haze ghosted

through surrounding pines. The worms

writhed as I pierced their skin,

blood and shit smeared the boards,

the crucified bodies dried and curled

under the sun my parents both shared.

The pain we receive, the little it takes

to give it tenfold. I won’t measure evil

out of units of illness and despair,

but while the porcupine munches

on clover, I’ll rest on a stone wall,

allow the sun to burn my neck red,

my hands finally at peace in my lap.

Originally published in The Massachusetts Review

November Praise

The smell of ferns and understory

after rain. The tick, tick, of stove,

flame under kettle. Bing Crosby,

and not just the Christmas records.

Cooking meat slowly off the bone,

and every kind of soup and stew.

To come this close to nostalgia,

but go no further, leaving behind

the boy who wore loneliness

like boots too big for his feet.

That time of evening,

when everything turns blue

in moonlight, when darkness

has yet to consume all for itself.

Originally published in Nine Mile Magazine

Okay, okay, okay. I know I said I’d let the poems speak for themselves, but for this next poem I need to state the following: The first section of my most recent book, The Bastard Children of Dharma Bums, consists of a series of poems that are sculpted poems, essentially erasure poems without the erased lines, taken from each chapter of Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums. I manipulate the lines, punctuation, and in some cases, the tense of a word, changing “broke” to “break,” for an example, but otherwise the words within each poem are as they fall within Kerouac’s novel. Here is one of those poems:

The Bastard Children of Dharma Bums #34

Raspberry Jell-O in the setting sun

poured through unimaginable craigs.

Rose-tint hope—brilliant and bleak.

Ice fields and snow raging mad.

I read snowy air and woodsmoke.

The wind dark, clouds forge.

The sing in my stovepipe absorbs

vaster, darker storm closing in

like a surl of silence. No starvation

turmoiling. My shadow the rainbow

I haloed. Your life a raindrop.

I stood in rose dusk, meditated

in half-moon thunder.

My mother’s love drenching rains

washed and washed.

I called Han Shan in the mountains.

I called Han Shan in morning fog.

I closed my eyes, yelled dark wild

down in my garbage pit.

My hair long in the mirror.

My skin soaking pristine light.

My fire roaring. I hear the radio

singing, She was the wind

which passes through everything.

Birds rejoicing sweet blueberries

for the last time. Sitting, I twisted

real life and cried cascades

answering the meditation bell.

I know desolation.

I owe gritty love back to this world.

These last two poems that I leave you with are from my first collection of poems, Break Every String. I hope you’ve enjoyed these poems and look forward to reading future essays, reviews, and interviews with other contemporary poets. 

Snow Angels

Each night they stare into the sky

and wonder why even with wings

they can never get off the ground.

Good reason for their creator 

to take three steps, cock his head 

and disown his gift to the world. 

Abandonment: a likely origin of anyone’s 

lack of faith. And faith: precisely what’s needed 

to soar in the purple abyss of winter. 

We step out into our lives like sun slicing 

between buildings and perform this one angelic 

act that melts from our consciousness.

We return to our houses to accomplish

something important, leaving behind

the ones who don’t know any better,

who see the wings as open arms, 

snow as flesh, and are willing to lie back down.

Born in the USA

 We were pumping our fists with Springsteen,

chanting the chorus as Reagan galloped 

the campaign trail, still pretending 

to be a cowboy, and the old man who lived 

in the blue house with the white fence 

lined with rosebushes was handing out mints 

from a bowl made out of a buffalo skull. 

Uncle Bob chopped off his thumbs 

in a metal press on his first day on the job. 

My father returned to Khe Sahn sleepwalking 

past our bedrooms, shouting out the names 

of smoke and moon. He had a woman he loved 

in Saigon, sang The Boss. Across the bay—

Ferris wheel lights and roller coaster screams. 

Child Services found my grandmother unfit 

to adopt. An ambulance in front of the blue house 

with the white fence lined with rosebushes. 

A white sheet. The bones and feathers 

of a dead seagull—a ship wreck 

on a rocky shore lapped by green waves. 

On their lunch break, my father, my uncles, 

and both my grandfathers, their names 

embroidered on their grease-stained shirts, 

stepped out of the factory and coughed up 

their paychecks to their wives idling in Regals, 

Novas, and Gremlins. Out by the gas fires

of the refinery. My father’s handlebar mustache 

terrified me. My brother built me castles 

out of blankets and chairs, larger than the house 

that confined them. Taught me how to leap 

off the couch like Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka,

how to moonwalk and breakdance. He’d go on

to teach me that disappointment’s a carcinogen.

My father took cover behind the Lay-Z-boy

in his underwear. My grandmother offered 

a pregnant runaway a place to stay in exchange 

for her baby. When the plant relocated to Mexico, 

my father brought home a pink slip heavier 

than a Huey Hog. The rosebushes became thorny 

switches. Over ham steaks and mashed potatoes, 

our parents poured out their divorce.

We had to decide who we wanted to live 

with before leaving the table. I’d go

wherever my brother went: that meant Mom. 

My father took a job out of state. 

My mother took a boyfriend, who

dragged his unemployment into a bar 

called The Pit, then staggered

into our house knocking over houseplants,

and I was the one ordered to clean 

the carpets with the wet/dry vac. We’d sneak 

out of the house at 3AM to swim 

in the neighbor’s pool, or ping rocks 

off hurtling freight trains. The city condemned 

the blue house with the paint-chipped fence. 

My mother’s eye, blackened. We slept in parks, 

better than home. She stood at the sink, 

sobbed, scrubbed blood-splotches

out of her white jacket with a soapy sponge. 

Wouldn’t press charges. My brother bought 

a dime bag and a revolver from a guy named Kool-Aid. 

My mother was crowned a welfare queen, and drove 

a Cadillac assembled out of political mythology. 

I smoked my first joint on the roof of a movie theater

with my brother and the stars. An after-school ritual: 

stepping over the passed-out boyfriend to grab 

a Coke out of the fridge. We spray-painted 

gang insignias across the boarded-up windows 

of the blue house with splintered teeth. The boyfriend 

could whip up one hell of an omelet. We didn’t hate 

him on Sunday mornings. My mother’s stiches. 

We swiped a bottle of Mad Dog, drank it while eating 

peanut butter & jelly sandwiches. My mother stashed 

bottles of gin in the leather boots my father bought 

for their last Christmas together. Twice they called 

me into the principal’s office because a knife fell out 

of my pocket at recess. We turned abandoned factories 

into playgrounds, busted out the windows with tornadic rage.

Somebody was asking for it, and somebody was going to get it. 

I overheard a teacher tell my mother, “He’s going to grow up 

to kill somebody.” Thanks to the Black Panthers, 

this white boy had free breakfast at school. 

My brother waited until the boyfriend was drunk 

on the toilet to burst in swinging a baseball bat. 

Later that night while taking a bath, I fished 

out a tooth biting me in the ass. Backhoes 

and bulldozers devoured the blue house 

with the collapsing roof. We rewound

and played back the catastrophic loss 

that plumed over Cape Canaveral 

on our VCRs. The boyfriend slammed 

a stolen van into a tree. She’d pour me

a bowl of Cheerios, pour herself a Scotch.

The boyfriend’s dentist kept good records. 

“I’m sending you to your father.” 

Son don’t you understand now? Front-page news:

firefighters dousing the mangled inferno. 

Got in a little hometown jam.  

I stood before a judge, pled guilty to 

shoplifting Christmas lights, the kind that twinkle. 

SMG’s ‘Are We Here Yet’?