stagehand poet
I’m honored to be on this roster of poets for the 2019 Ellensburg Poetry Prowl.
There’s something wonderful about the way that poets in our state connect to and support one another. I’ve enjoyed getting to meet some of these writers already at various events throughout Washington.
To study up, check out WA 129.
https://wapoetlaureate.org/book-lists/
I’m thrilled to announce the release of my new chapbook, In these failing times I can forget, available right now from Papeachu Press.
This book is about events I observe and experience in my rapidly growing city. The poems seek to imagine people complexly, and examine the way that we treat one another. It is my hope that they are poems of memory, longing, and witness.
Another poem published! This one was a finalist for the Letheon Poetry Prize.
Please select “PDF” on the menu bar to download an image with the correct lineation.
Waking up from surgery really was just like this.
http://anesthesiology.pubs.asahq.org/article.aspx?articleid=2671003&resultClick=3
One of my favorite online journals has chosen to publish three of my road trip poems! I’m so happy that they’ve found a home with https://www.cascadiarisingreview.com/
A little rhyming ditty I wrote after Regina Spektor’s Summer in the City
Springtime in the City
finds dime bags on the sidewalk
I’m walking out on Lakeview
wanna eat the weeds in the crosswalk
The road signs speak in pictures
and I see the whole damn story
Here is the figure of you
standing alone in my history
Springtime in the city
hospital trash in the doorway
there’s art on every brick wall
abandoned socks out on the highway
When I feel the traffic breathing
as blood cells on the way through
I start to finally realize
what the city looks like without you
Trusses tower on the hillside
over pleasure yachts and racers
Mint wrappers dance like bumblebees
around the legs of intimate strangers
And I chew dandelions
as you drain out of my body
I pull your veins from mine I
trade the shape of you for beauty
Springtime in the city
my rich and garbage city
The street weeds taste like mica
and Lakeview overpass is glittering
Poets to Come
after Walt Whitman
America, I cannot tell your story.
No voice sings broad within to justify you.
I look for your beauty in my early memory and find only dollhouses,
broken piano keys, tea sets from another Paris.
America, I just don’t have the tools.
You wear me down with your pander, your holler and your sprint.
You run, you tweet, you talk, you shout into the wild.
You gaze into the mirror when your mirrors should be covered.
America, you are a continent of sledgehammers driving spikes through
railroad ties, of pneumatic nail guns percussing rooftops.
You are a continent that carved kitchens out of rock.
Most adolescent empire, Arouse! and see your value on this earth.
You have brothers and sisters to the north and to the south—
Brothers and sisters and more reaching out across the Pacific, the Atlantic,
across the water, across a desert.
Open your entrepreneurial hands!
