publications
CHAPBOOKS
My chapbook George Washington Is Dead was released in April 2012. My chapbook Time Travel was released in August 2016.
Four poems from Time Travel that have been previously published in journals are included on my Poetry page.
The title poems from each book are reprinted below.
If you would like to buy a copy of either, please contact me or order at Finishing Line Press or at Amazon.com
George Washington Is Dead
my friend announced, swirling her wine, looking stunned,
like a kid who’s just found out where babies come from.
She’d been on the porch, reading a bit of history,
and it struck her – every person in the book was dead.
She would die.
George has his face on quarters and currency.
Schools, squares, and even a state he never visited
bear his name. But no one remains who drank a pint
with him, knew if his dentures clacked when he chewed
or ran her fingers through his powdered hair.
I’ve spent hundreds of hours assembling albums with snapshots
of babies, kids clowning next to monuments, Christmas mornings,
pimpled teens departing for the prom with their third-choice date.
I’ve preserved news clippings and diplomas under plastic
for generations who will never know us.
Sometimes I don’t recognize my child’s face a half block away.
Yet, across an airport, I can spot her firm gestures, his lanky gait.
A neighbor lamented she no longer knew her son’s stride after boot camp.
While he was at war, my grandfather’s first wife died, childless, of flu.
I wear her gold ring – all that remains, except her name: Anna Dean.
Time Travel
How fast the foreign becomes the familiar.
How quickly old releases young.
Time and place bend and weave
until I have always awakened
to a rooster's crow and summer sun gliding
through gaps in wood-shuttered windows
recessed in stone walls half a millennium old
while breeze tousles the olive orchard,
and the toast-and-trout aroma of hillside
pastures pocked with grazing gray sheep
competes with the perfume of espresso.
Italian undulates around me,
Inexplicably, I respond with French
nouns and Spanish phrases.
I am as old as the rolling hills
and Etruscan ruins and as young as
my jeans flung over a rope
strung between two gnarled pines.
I watch them dance and dry in the wind,
my feet bare in the dying grass.
INDIVIDUAL POEMS
Individual or small groups of poems have been published in various literary journals, magazines, and anthologies, including Cradle Songs, an Anthology of Poems on Motherhood; Kansas City Voices; Main Channel Voices; Marginalia; Mountain Time, a Poetry Anthology; New Ohio Review; Red Wheelbarrow; The Women’s Review of Books; and Whetstone.