Over the years, a number of my poems were featured at riverbabble, a literary journal that unfortunately is no longer online. riverbabble was founded in Berkeley, California in 2002 by Pandemonium Press and published twice a year—once in June, the Bloom’s Day Issue, and once in January, the Winter Solstice…
Issue No. 4 kerning | a space for words now out!
My poem, “Ernestine” is included in these fine pages. I wrote this poem for the late Sylvia Plath after I went to visit a memorial in Salem, Oregon in early 2023. The cremains of Ernestine Kottke Plath, Sylvia Plath’s grandmother, were in a canister marked #177 (out of a total of 3423) at the Oregon State Hospital from her death in 1919…
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Publication News: “The Cat Lady”
My poem, “The Cat Lady” was published in Stirring in January 2012. My beloved, half-Siamese creatures—Balthazar, Ping, and Ryman have long traveled over the rainbow bridge…
Published but Uncollected…
I have a good number of poems that were published online or in print and then never found their way for some reason or another into my various poetry book collections. Here is one I have always liked because it speaks to the strangeness of growing up where I did—the anthracite coal country of northeastern Pennsylvania
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Publication News: Fragments in qaartsiluni
Qarrtsiluni published my poem, “I started near the far north. Ran.” in their Fragments issue back in 2012. Their call for submissions requested “in the wild” creations more than overly crafted pieces so that’s what I sent in!
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Publication News: “Transubstantiation”
I can’t remember how I came up with the title of this poem. Perhaps I wanted to invoke the notion in Christian theology about the conversion of the body and blood of Jesus Christ into homely bread and wine. In a poem about suicide—specifically death by hanging—why would I have dared to invoke the Eucharist at all…
Publication News: A Poem Named for a Ralph Ellison Novel…
My poem, “Juneteenth,” was published in Scissors & Spackle, Vol., 3: Laundry Lines: An Anthology, way back in September 2013. At the time, it took its title from Ralph Ellison’s second novel, Juneteenth; in the decade since, Juneteenth has (finally) been recognized as a National Holiday! My poem is about a very different subject, however—a vignette from June 19, 1977 when I was a very new, very young mother…
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A Pause in the Middle of the Line
My poem, “Caesura,” was published by Stirring way back in November 2011. A caesura is a poetic term-of-art that describes “a stop or pause in a metrical line, often marked by punctuation or by a grammatical boundary…
Writing in Form: The Triversen
My disturbingly prescient poem, “Peak Oil Comes Hither,” was published as the final part of my triptych, “Distant Early Warnings,” at PANK back in January 2012. It was written in flexible form called the triversen, shorthand for triple verse sentence. Each sentence is broken into three lines
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Publication News: Pilgrimage Magazine
Pilgrimage Magazine published “Bird, Flown,” my short poem influenced by Federico García Lorca in the Beginnings and Flight double issue of their print journal way back in Fall 2015…