There is a very cool coffeehouse called The Stacks two miles from our house down Killingsworth Street. It not only serves coffee and breakfast burritos but is also a very cool community library. I met friends at The Stacks for coffee and conversation a few days ago. All around us sat (mostly) silent people with their varied incarnations of coffee drinks. Nearly all were either wearing headphones or staring into one screen or another
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Publication News: “Inventory”
Sometime a poem can emerge from something as mundane as the cleaning out of a cluttered desk drawer. Cataloguing the objects found, remembering the reason why (if any) a particular item—a ticket stub, a stray button, a silver-dollar coin from the 1890s—got stashed away, somehow deserving to be saved. How to then build a poem from a group of seemingly unrelated objects? What through-line could work to ties such disparities together into a kind of whole?…
Publication News: “These Miles to My River”
I am drawn to bodies of water, particularly rivers and streams. I love to walk along them and stare at their rapids and ripplings, cross them on bridges, and study the way they change through the seasons with rainfall, snowmelt, or drought. One of the longer versions of my preferred author bio attempts to spell out why…
Publication News: Ghost Town Poetry 20th Anniversary Anthology, Volume 3
To celebrate twenty years of the Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic in November 2024, Printed Matter Vancouver and Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic co-hosts Christopher Luna, Toni Lumbrazo Luna, and Morgan Paige have collected poems from ones read by Ghost Town readers over the years for their third anthology
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Making It to Semi-Finalist: “Your Going Away Party at the Hotel Dread”
When I first returned to writing poetry, way back in 2005 and 2006, I took a series of classes through an organization called Writers on the Net. I was incredibly lucky to stumble on an outstanding teacher, Bob Haynes and his courses, Daydreams I and Daydreams II…
Publication News: “Lamentation: A Cento”
My poem, “Lamentation: A Cento,” has been published in Issue #14 of The Poeming Pigeon: A Journal of Poetry and Art. After ten years, this will be the final issue. I wrote this poem as part of a cento-centric project during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic
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(Re)Publication News: “Six Degrees”
I have taken many trains across these United States. Many of them have romantic-sounding names—the Coast Starlight, the Empire Builder, the Capitol Limited, the California Zephyr, and the Texas Eagle are the names of a few
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Writing in Form: A Narrative Poem in Syllabics
My narrative poem in syllabics, “Old, New, Broken, Blue,” was published in the Traditional Form issue of Blast Furnace, Volume 2, No. 2 in Spring of 2012. The pattern is this: Each stanza has lines bearing five syllables followed by a final line of two beats…
Published Online after Being in Print: “And I will tell you a story”
The opening poem in my poetry collection, Every Door Recklessly Ajar—“And I Will Tell You a Story”—was recently re-published online in Fall 2024 at Poemeleon: A Literary Journal. It previously appeared in print in the journal, Gold Man Review, out of Salem Oregon.
Playing with Form: The Abecedarian
In Summer 2018, riverbabble published my poem, “First Line of Defense: A Cento.” Not only does this poem use the cento form, stitching together lines borrowed from other poets into a poem all its own, but it is also an (almost) abecedarian. An abecedarian is a poem in which the first letter of each line or stanza follows sequentially through the alphabet…
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