My debut poetry collection, Time Traveling, will be published by Cornerstone Press in 2026.
Here are two poems from my forthcoming book.
The Six Swans
Transformed, my brothers flapped frightfully,
twisting their necks, taking off into empty sky.
I had to be silent for six years to save them
and sew six shirts of aster flowers
but the last was unfinished, and so
in place of his left arm, my youngest brother
has a wing. When my skin throbs
with heat he fans me, sweeping it back and forth.
Sometimes I weep to feel these feathers
and their minor power—for what good
is one wing? I wonder at those tender bones
I cannot see, the prickly flesh
never touched by sun, the vanished fingers
and what they might grasp.
But he holds me close, that white span
folded over my back, and whispers
If we are men at all, it’s because of you.
Adaptive Evolution
Tell me this isn’t a miracle: an eye
migrates over the flat head of a fish
as it scoots along the sand. Weeks go by
as infant tortoises dig inch by inch
through dark soil to feel the light. Pelagic
birds might not touch land for a year, but soar
to nesting grounds where they once hatched as chicks
in the same slot in the cliff years before.
Leave it to humans to make this a mess.
DDT weakened eggshells so they split;
oil spills matted feathers, froze birds to death.
But we’re changing too, right? We can’t predict
how we might be reborn, what we might claw
our way out of, as we trade dirt for dawn.
The editors at The Hooghly Review kindly nominated my poem “One Goose Lands” for the Best of the Net 2024, and they published an interview with me on their site.
I had the honor of being selected for the 2023 First Ten Pages Fellowship at Rockvale Writers’ Colony, and this is an interview about my time there.