Quietly cruising the Crooked Tree lagoon
our delighted guide spots an agami heron, so rare
the eBird app instantly tags it as questionable.  

Two tones of iridescent blue, crimson splash
on her chest, a few dazzling white feathers curving
from her crown.  Our resplendent long shot.  

She runs her fingers

Through blistered hair

Naked in the foam of

An original point of view

Wisdom from living

An unfiltered life of

Sleeping in the sand

Track marks penetrate

The holy land as daylight

Enfolds itself

Midnight over her shoulders

Sitting at your feet like

A moon beam, a shadow

Of a garden

She is clean from everything

She has seen or felt pushed

Against home walls

She doesn’t have to look

anywhere, it’s all right in

Front of her in blood and guts

Tendered elbows holding

God’s tools for the sacrifice

She moans like a child at

The sight of happiness

The soul and the

Body remember a

Tortured love refuses

To satisfy the

Morrison like angel

Pauses of heaven in

Her voice

When she moans

I moan, too

atop a grand crag 
a dog  a hoe  two gloves  me
this one day   this bliss

almost full moon lingering in the summer storm
boldly presenting its illumination
illustrating strewn illusions
preforming grandeur in the darkest form

sassie

Over and over again

My back strains

My bones crack

My neck cranes

Another thing I have to show you I’m capable of

Another way you keep me wrapped around your finger

Another game you force me to play

How far will you go?

How low will you make me bend?

Until I’m enough for you

I hovered, knees aching, above the chipped porcelain lip—
First stall, Berea Walmart, a place
made for forgetting,
not revelation.

The trash bin gaped like a jaw unhinged,
and there inside, pink cardboard curled,
a cheap prophecy:
“2 tests – Test Five Days Before Missed Period.”

Someone had waited here for truth—
on a bed of wrappers,
flushable wipes,
and the scent of lemon disinfectant
trying to cover fear.

Was she a girl still breathing
under her father’s scripture-heavy roof,
who whispered the boxes to the cashier
beneath a hoodie
and a trembling hand?
Or a woman, already worn thin
by too many almosts and not yets,
counting days like loose change?

And why here?
Not the privacy of home,
but fluorescent lights,
tile floors damp from shoes,
and other lives in neighboring stalls.

Then I remember—
another stall, another trembling—
you, arriving
at my office door,
sunlight casting your silhouette
on the windows I hadn’t noticed
until I saw your eyes.

You chose me.
Not Mom.
Not your husband.
You chose me
to weep before,
to confide the grief
of a choice already made.

I did not flinch.
I did not judge.
I held you—
as one might hold a truth
too large for language.

You returned from San Francisco,
haunted by art and hunger.
You were living in a storage unit,
sketching dreams too wild for canvas.
I told you to come home.
And you did.
But not for long.

Now you are a specter,
a ledger entry I update quarterly,
a number I text into silence.
Your grief wrapped around you
like a widow’s shawl,
stitched from the memory of mother.

I wish I could speak through
your salt-hardened shell
and whisper:
I never blamed you for the ghost
that took that voice.

I sit above this Walmart toilet,
soul paused between paper and metal,
and pray—
not for forgiveness,
but for the girl who dropped the boxes,
and for the woman
who once wept in my arms,
and for a sister
who might still remember
our shared name.

And I wonder—
in her silence,
does she remember
how I never turned away?

Subtitle: “Can You Imagine” and the English teacher

I follow the words
as I hear it read beautifully
by a craftsman.
One should float on the sounds
and not pounce, dissect, underline,
and seize upon phrases
to use as examples.
But I deal unapologetically in tropes,
the personification
masterfully used,
the imagery created
by sensory details.
My eyes use a highlighter
as do my ears.
While I tear the poem apart,
I marvel at its wholeness.
It is so smartly crafted
and beautiful in all its parts.

The birds are already singing when
I stretch out of bed,

light softening the edges of darkness
just enough to see, the world still faded,

finding its way into daytime like a sleepy
child rubbing their eyes.

I watch color bolden hilltops and
spread like golden butter as sun

rises up past their peaks fanning
out through tree lines into valleys,

it’ll kiss the hollows last, later, and
only for the shortest time.

There’s no chill or dew today,
air already thick with the promise of

rain like even the universe is
holding its breath.