Poetry – Waccamaw

A Stark Landscape Rendered In Oil

1 December 2025

Categories: Poetry

you’d emptied just for me.
I love the vein
in your left hand that paints the only world
I love. You blink

and each mirage to ever blur
this earth reverses. I run
my mouth, look down,
am done. I don’t know how
to be changed by goodness.
Shadows on the street waltz
to a voice they cherish most
of all and so I steal a shade
in which to stand and watch
and weep.

It’s you alone I trust to turn
the air into a colour.
It’s you alone I trust to dole
the apple of my pain.

(Before even your mouth I’ll kiss
the maker of the world I love.
That rivulet.
A thief in blue.
Before even your mouth.)

Was it you who figured the artist
as a kind of moody scientist, desk
a clean laboratory, gloved fingers
dissecting crisis like an animal?
All night I lie awake to ponder
this gorgeous potential
for gore between us.
I’ll wear the bone
of the last creature to wander the brink
of the woods of your life.

Working Artist

1 December 2025

Categories: Poetry

The trees on the walk home
from my office job are stumps.
All day, outside the window,
I listen to construction workers
cut pines from the top down,
then mow over their trunks
with a yellow skid loader
that looks just like my dad’s.
Right now, he’s throwing bricks
at his factory job in a concrete
building, though he calls it the plant.
Not green, but sure as shit root
rotting, vining into every one
of his smashed fingers, his caving
lungs and chest. When I build
an image of my dad, he’s not
impressed. There’s nothing
conceptual about his fingers
turning blue or black. It’s life.
Fact. Look and see. In my living,
I complain. Grow weary trying
to capture in writing how I’ve forgotten
to walk with pressure on all four
corners of my feet. Every day,
at four in the morning, my dad
slides on his worn steel-toe boots,
walks out his front door, listens
to the hymn of his ignition, plays
his body like an instrument.

A Field in Winter

1 December 2025

Categories: Poetry

I am white with forgetting.
The wind takes my name
and runs it ragged
against the mouths of trees.
Something died here—
not a deer,
but softer.
Something that once wore lace
and answered to “daughter.”
The frost comes in like a nurse,
measured and mute.
I let her pin my limbs
to the earth—
crosses made of bone
and surrender.
Underneath, I hum.
My roots ache like teeth.
There is a hunger coiled
just beneath the soil,
waiting for spring
to peel the silence back
like a scab.
They think I sleep.
They do not know
I am listening
to every worm
that dares to call this stillness home.

Alligator

9 December 2024

Categories: Poetry

In long-ago day
we crawled out
of the sea, sister.

I stood upright,
configured a hand
arched a foot
and ran.

You stayed beast,
grew a spiked tail
slit your eyes to sit
above a double line
of impossible teeth

regal in the silk star
night of black water

indifferent as cat
or queen on land.

Dreamed into life
by the sea, she’ll have
us back one day.

Bits of salt, sister.

Apricity

6 December 2024

Categories: Poetry

Gather up memories
of when the earth was freshly
born, when lakes covered deserts

and deserts carried grains
of sand into volcanic seas
and trees sang to each

other, contralto, a rushing wind
through leaves and grasses,
and time split open like a fallen egg.

Gather cloud-washed dragonflies
and hurricane lamps
swarmed with lightening bugs

winking, winking
while a lighthouse steeples
over subterranean mountains.

Gather seeds to scatter
in a barren meadow filled with the scent
of future wildflowers. Gather orchestral

music and emptiness;
spy the luthier’s hand
forging vessels and bowstrings.

Gather me and you,
should you choose to love me.
Gather our children

and our children’s children.
Gather time, the broken yolk, and soak
it with grasses and golden deserts.

NOTE TO SELF THAT WILL BECOME AN APOLOGY LATER

2 December 2024

Categories: Poetry

First, you are a source of luminous wonder
Your brilliance fills the sky.

Then, a seizure of darkness
Collapses your vertebral tower and boats sink

In the harbor. A lighthouse pulls one
Hell of a shadow from inevitable blue depths. Haven’t you

Been the night-shredding radiance so many seek
Safe passage from? All the mythic creatures

Human hands have conjured from the depths come
Barreling towards the surface now.

The ocean floor raises continents
When it shudders. Your shaking

Is a séance. Summons ghosts from your throat.
The light flash behind your eyes sends night

Mares plunging into the ocean. Lighthouse
Zoetrope. See how the islands

Dress themselves with the illusion
Of dance. How the wreckage

Pulls itself back together with a crack
Like leg bones snapping.

One minute you are alive with such incredible light.
The next, phantoms peel themselves

From the clouds. An island forest grows haunted
With all the ships run ashore.

Somewhere in that forest, a tree falls
And crushes the only witness.

Spaceship Winter

2 December 2024

Categories: Poetry

“NASA is researching risks for Mars missions which are grouped into five human
spaceflight hazards related to the stressors they place on the body. These can be summarized with
the acronym “RIDGE,” short for Space Radiation, Isolation and Confinement, Distance from
Earth, Gravity fields, and Hostile/Closed Environments.”

Space Radiation
My husband keeps telling me that opening the microwave door before the buzzer sounds will kill
me, I’m already in the basement, radon detectors, twice yearly monitoring, do we remediate,
track bluelight, research glasses, limit screen time, hold my breath before our eyes are scanned,
orange pulsing orb of unclouded vision, the healthy vein. Brick will cause cancer. Plane flights
will cause cancer; the Teflon pan, the TV dinner. Maybe our water is too high in fluoride. Maybe
iron. I’m pretty sure everyone is lying about having the bomb. And I know, for certain, that
whatever anger already has is more than enough.

Isolation and Confinement
No one gave me a psych exam before I moved to Maine. Does the snowpack in front of the door
make you feel cozy or confined? Have you ever screamed into the cold and watched your words
freeze? Do you stop when the sun blinds the snow and just let it all wash over you, every particle
of hoarded light? Do you make tunnel? Labyrinth? Shelter? My children practice self defense,
hurling snowballs at imaginary enemies, crafting escape routes on sleds faster than migration,
they outrace me.

Distance from Earth
Enchantment is easy: our wood stove, shadow contrast of icing pine. The way color floods each
sunset until everywhere rainbows, streaks of salmon crimson so beautiful you never think storm.
It’s only locals up here. We pay for each other’s groceries, fuel oil, pass the peace. Cars drive
slowly up my icy hill, passing us walking, everyone waves.

Gravity Fields
Israel and Palestine. Russia and Ukraine. Iran. China. My daughter reads about vortices and I
think war must be the opposite, life unspiraling never to return. Remember when one body
moving toward another was something beautiful? A law of attraction? In the tent cities we are
passing out blankets. Someone always says get help. Someone always says, take this hand. But
compassion is never enough. The wind blows. The bench empties itself. Another body picks up
its frail shadow and moves on.

Hostile/Closed Environments
I want to say that running is resistance, but I’m not sure. I look at my hands sometimes, bit nails,
wrinkled knuckles, slippery rings, stout fingers like treestumps, you can count these years,
loveline’s luxurious gash. Trees write history, dry times, drought rings, condensing themselves,
the forest itself a boundary, fat again with flood. Can I say peace on earth if I know I’m always
lying? Or just settle for Candlemas, sky of gentle shadow, groundhog slipping back inside its
burrow, paws already folded in prayer, an early spring.

In the artificial light

2 December 2024

Categories: Poetry

On a street painted with the steps
of the hurried and the dreaming, I am
a whisper among shouts. A child’s laughter
bursting like an air bubble, spiraling
in the beach’s splashing light.

An old man perches a storybook on a bench to etch
his face with tales deep as tree rings, padding
his worn trails. The love
he knew, now simmering—tea leaves
in the evening calm.

A woman darts by the bench—her conversation
a string of pearls lost to the wind. She wavers
on a tightrope of her own making. Squeezing
lemons into her schedule, I see her

spinning gold from her straw. Beneath
the canopy stretching its wide arms, roots

crochet stories into cobblestones.
Each passerby a brushstroke on the easel, easily
missed. Pale faces glowing

in the artificial light, life unfolding
in novels before them. A footnote

in the epic of the street, I bear witness

to the living scarves unwinding, each world
whipping around on its own axis, forever
a riddle, as we are.

Moyie Springs, Idaho

2 December 2024

Categories: Poetry

After Cecilia Woloch

Surely, there were bears starved by fire.
Beacons of the sky’s assault
and the rain that would never come.

The sound of roosters strangled to death.
Before, only
uninterrupted blue. Rows of ugly

hand-grown carrots—fertilized attempts
at closeness. Before the cougar

hiding beneath the garlic barn. Surely,
the goat woke up knowing

it would not see the sun fall
behind the trees again. Wouldn’t find
its way to the merry-go-round rusted

with apple cores. Isn’t this
proof of something?

What watches us, and the surrealness
of dirt—replacing ten quarter-moons
with hieroglyphs we can’t read back.

Surely, what’s dug by hand
is worth remembering.
Canon of dandelion dust and horse jumps.

Before the root rot. Before
the dog yielded to the broken couch.

Surely, there was a banjo playing.
The clouds, a bruising violence.
Everybody under them.

Lonesome is a resentful night; a rancid
flour sack; a sapling separated

from the crown. The same warning.
Surely the dirt road will lead us out.

The Elephant Tax

2 December 2024

Categories: Poetry

Sugarcane drivers have it all worked out.
Ever since that first elephant,
wet highway, emergencybreak, warninglight,
the prayer that comes when God, four–footed,
ambles forth from dark vines, a question in her trunk,
the drivers have slowed everything down.
Endless horizon of an animal eye in their sideview mirror,
untriggers fingers, unclenches stundart, pepperspray, bomb.
Let the elephant approach unharmed,
expose endless rows of cut cane feathered like birds.
Let her taste her small puja of sweetness.

Turns out they know which truck you drive,
wave you down the road like a polite crossing guard
delicately keeping score. Turns out
paying the elephant tax is easy,
one trunkful a day, Great One,
Remover of Obstacles, Master of Words,
you seek me from the forest,
many handed holder of answers,
I slow my truck, bow head to shaking heart,
with words sugaring my mouth, I pay.

SELF-PORTRAIT AS A MUSEUM

5 December 2023

Categories: Poetry

Most days I am a museum of things I want to forget
– E. E. Scott

[Part 1]

Museum: a depository of grief displayed aesthetically;
I carry the mishaps of things I want to forget
like the fragments of a brittle artifact—
i. the days I wish I never lived
ii. the partition of my father and mother
iii. the fear of my mother growing old
iv. the pain that came with the loss of my grandmother

[Interlude]

Consider this
poem
a museum
of self-portraits:
of a young adult forgotten
to the retention of survival
of a poet scared of the
greater grief his poem will become
of a boy who dreams of
the future after dying
of aborted dreams
& miscarriages
& a receding hairline

[Part 2]

Aesthetic: the joy that refuses to come in the morning
—I’ve always searched for it in bird songs

the unseen light at the end of the tunnel
—hope is an illusion is a phantasm

the better bad days that are still ahead

the substance of things hoped for

the evidence of things not seen

Dietary Positivism For Dinner

5 December 2023

Categories: Poetry

It is well with my soul.

It is well like a soup.

the bucket of living a day in my life

is knowing it’s a soup.

garlic,

onions,

tomatoes

red pepper,

scotch pepper,

bell pepper,

alligator pepper.

let’s not ignore the meat, that’s me[an].

If I say I’m the pork of most days,

will that mean that I’m conservative?

or that I have no beef left in me,

save for the soft bleached cowskins.

regardless I’m what is being cooked, the soul

of the soup, the chicken feet, & the rabbit ears.

So yea, it is well with my soul in a soup.

It is well with my soul in this soup.

but the dearth of faith inside me

when I say amen is also a well.

clayed,

big as a civil war,

unmistakable cos it’s raised on a hill

like an obese nose,

untimely,

yet yielding to seasons.

So It is well with my soul in November.

It is well with my soul in July

It is well when the soup is bad

It is well when the well is dry.

How do you say the knife is blunt in Yorùbá?

5 December 2023

Categories: Poetry

we say the knife is dead,
or the mouth of the knife is dead
because the death of the mouth is the death
of purpose, or the death of the potency of life
plumbed in the metric noesis inside its tongue.
what we believe— a destiny must sing its course,
regardless. the fire too, must burn its yoke of oxygen.
where I come from, the mouth is also a lethal weapon.
where I come from, you cannot hush the gong
of its pealing, unless the gong is not a gong.
whatever silence the knife has learned in exile
is self-taught in unused. so go ahead, my soul,
follow the ancient achiever’s path, sharpen all
the knives the Blacksmith sheathed
under your skins. sing, Spirit, through
the dreams, speak the harvest
through these efforts, & cut all
my fantasies to testimonies.

Sweet Tea, No Ice

5 December 2023

Categories: Poetry, S.C. Creative Sociology Writing Competition

It must be that imagination has an expiration date.
My grandmother will never change the amount of sugar
in her sweet tea.
She wouldn’t dream of rearranging the plants on her patio.
She can’t accept that the creeks she knew as a child have dried up.
That the fish her father once caught,
can now only be found in the state over.
It would be easy to live in a beautiful youth.
And if every memory was painted by
growth,
how could you imagine memories painted by death?
Which is all your granddaughters will know.
A world of fire and plague.
She pleads seniority.
I plead for the chance to reach seniority.
I will sit with her on the patio,
holding a glass of tea,
watching as it melts the ice.
I will show her the two worlds I imagine.
The first is a world where vibrational frequencies have finally been decoded,
and giant speakers can be wired to trigger the release of natural plant insecticides.
Halting dead zones. Increasing food supply.
We might last.
By showing her the other world, I scare her.
I show her where we are headed.
I tell her “Even your Bible will burn.”
I tell her that one day she will look down
and see the soot on her hands,
the matches clenched in her fist.

◆

Exegesis

This piece was inspired by my experience growing up in a place that loves the Earth but does not believe in global warming. The culture of the South involves the appreciation for nature, and also the appreciation of simplicity. The simplicity of changing nothing and living life how you always have. This can be such a beautiful lifestyle when it means no phones, fishing in Appalachia, and drinking tea that immediately gives you a sugar high. I wanted to include that feeling in my piece, this feeling of beauty that influences everyone in these areas. I then wanted to lead you into how this can be such an issue. How conflicting it can be to have conversations about change with the people you love and respect, but do not fully understand. There comes a point when frustration consumes you, and in the case of this piece, my frustration is at the people who want to live in the beautiful, simple past, because it means they do not believe, or don’t want to believe, the world has been changing. This lack of regard for the future is ignorance. It is a lack of imagination, because you cannot understand the world looking any different, even if it’s a positive change.

In line 18, I introduced a more recent scientific discovery that I have been obsessed with this past year. Vibrational frequencies have begun to be decoded, and mean much more to plants than we originally thought. Caterpillar movements spur certain plants to excrete a natural chemical as a defense mechanism. If humans can figure out how to replicate this movement through vibrational frequencies, then we may have a chance to use vibrations to eliminate at least one form of pesticide, and hopefully more down the road. The possibilities in this discovery are endless, and if we can eliminate pesticides, we would stop some of the contamination of the Mississippi River. We could stop the dead zones in the ocean that occur from harsh chemicals, and that kill all life that needs Oxygen. To me, this discovery is the beginning of something that could be incredible, it just will take some imagination. By including actual science in this piece, I wanted to emphasize that this isn’t unrealistic. This is something that has promise all over the world, along with plenty of other discoveries. It is easy to fall into Climate Doomism, where there seems to be no hope for our future, when in fact it is just going to take a lot of creative people getting innovative.

This piece is meant to make you feel empathy, because most people love someone who may not understand the severity of climate change. It’s important to educate those around us of the science that tells us the atmosphere has changed. That the stakes are higher. It’s important to emphasize that if we are creative and push towards a better future, it is possible. Hope is necessary for any form of change. This piece is also supposed to make you feel scared. We live in a world that praises consumerism, conspiracy theories, and nostalgia, all of which have little place in this fight. A lot of uncomfortable conversations are ahead of us, but are needed to invoke any form of awakening. You are either the one holding the match, or the one burning. Do not be selfish at the expense of the world.

Disappointing Fruit, or A Tempest of My Own Making

5 December 2023

Categories: Poetry, S.C. Creative Sociology Writing Competition

I wake to another dream of ripening
Becoming perfectly palatable
For all who want to eat me whole.

When I wake I wait for my dreams
To become reality I open my arms
Wide and welcome newfound sweetness.

In my days I remain sour and people
Choke as they try to force me down their throats
My nights see me red-faced and sweat-drenched with effort

I try to make amends with those
I’ve disappointed who sneered at my rigidity
Those who want answers for my sharpness

But I have no answers or antidotes
I only have my dreams where I do everything right
Where I am exactly who people want me to be

Because women who look like me don’t
Stand a chance if they aren’t palatable
To women who look like you.

In All Things

4 December 2023

Categories: Poetry

Say it straight.
Say how the grasses wave you along your path.
How the small nod of the field mouse sends you up.
How the nuthatch’s single note, repeated, reverbs in your bones,
your veins, muscles, what
is of you and what is of all this?

Say it.
All the years of words encripted
to what you thought would be heard—
the forest is silent. It does not mind your reticence.
It is patient beyond your wildest imagining.
But it is time, it is time, so

Say what is true: that you are not just you,
you do not exist except within all this—

The grasses tremble with dew’s touch,
and the nuthatch flits among spruce boughs,
and the field mouse basks in the rising sun,
and you are them,
and they are you,
and this is it,
Said straight.

‘The Enemy’

4 December 2023

Categories: Poetry

My father says, with a laugh,
I don’t see color. He doesn’t say it
while looking at me. My father is
an intelligent man, a career man,
a man who would never cause waves.
My father is a kind man, an alcoholic,
a computer geek, a conservative,
an electrical engineer, and yet he doesn’t
look me in the eye – he doesn’t want
to make me uncomfortable. He would never
want to make anyone uncomfortable.
He is a good man, a stand up guy, saves
for the future. His father was a drunk, his brother
was a drunk and he became a drunk. He is American.
He achieved the American dream. Voted for Trump
the first time. I didn’t know my father until he told me
to leave the room when I was a child:
You need to find somewhere else to be.
I didn’t know my father until he pulled the wooden post
from my parent’s bed frame and threatened my mother:
It would only take one swing.

Her Ghost

4 December 2023

Categories: Poetry

after “The Blue Dress” by Victoria Chang

I wear grandma’s collared shirt— it mostly hangs on
a blue hanger in my closet, fabric continuing
to thin with time, beneath the earth like her body,
as if I have worn her all my life.

I wear her ring on my finger, hold the metal
she used to fiddle with, polish the diamond,
admire the band. Remove her when I wash my hands.
Check to feel she’s still there. She held on

when leukemia wore her, through divorce,
during the war, when she lost
three babies. Grief is wearing her
shirt on my back like a haunting.

Grief brushes my skin like cotton,
striped like her mother’s hand sewn lines.
I keep moving beyond panels of stitches–
Her mother’s mother threads through me.

I’m writing stories for them, trying
to fill days with her belongings. I never
heard her say goodbye. There is a hole
in her shirt. There is a hole in me.

I began with listening

4 December 2023

Categories: Poetry

Carbondale, Illinois, May 1992

sound of shattered glass
whiplashed mother
in her long dress
muscles tightened
one summer night

five college girls
in a Mustang
crashed into her
Dodge Caravan
t-boned her       driver’s side
metal                   barrelling
into       belly
seatbelt               low
pedal                   anchored      to floor
she was alone       she held me

in her womb I didn’t move

***

Kept inside the wreckage
until Paramedics cut her out

she stood in the hospital room
pieces of glass held by her belly

fell to the floor when she saw my father
standing in the door

Everything’s okay. She’s okay.

I still hear the shape of her voice in me.

Ambit

4 December 2023

Categories: Poetry

N: the range or limit that is covered by something (such as a law).

Say the ambit of Italy is the sea, you rather find your way back or your way finds you back.

Back, back, back. The turbulence is behind you, the chaos is ahead of you, say we are in the midst
of multilingual doom.

The night, the sea and the noise of mothers calling their kids back into life, or another innate who
suddenly becomes the snapping arms of the ocean.

Ambit is where you are until the Naval says it is a good time to go back home, until your country
calls for you, until the Earth says it is now.

Ambit is the limit you could go until your body says it is over and your legs disown the road.

It is the apogee where plane becomes ashes and horses become dust, men become a spring of
worms.

It’s someone’s Agadez, someone’s Accra, someone’s Tripoli, or Lampedusa. It’s best as someone’s
Berlin.

The lawyer calling to tell you that your application has been granted, but you are no more.