poetry.

JUNE 2018
"driving with lucretius"// nc literary review (print)

                        …if someone should race to the shore,
To the utter edge of the world, and fling a spear,
Would you say that the spear should spin from his strong arm
And fly far in the direction it was sent,
Or that something could prevent it and block its flight?

                                                —Lucretius, On the Nature of Things

Alone on a mountain road sloping toward flatter land,
I drive—now swaddled by arching branches 
and leaves and dim light filtering through, now 
exposed and rolling loose along cupped valley floors.
In deep shadow, streams tumble frothy 
between bare blackened stones, then disappear 
into earth beneath the road. A valley church’s 
glossy white paint scatters sunlight in all directions 
as if for fun God’s mimicking that first breathy time. 
Gravel driveways snake up to squat brick houses,
cars parked at odd slants out front. Two men 
walk a fence line, wide-brimmed hats and 
old Levi’s, circle of a snuff tin worn pale and soft 
into one back pocket apiece. Cows stand 
bunched by the dozen—chewing, blinking, 
swatting flies with puny tails. But the sky: 
gray, flat, slick—a curve of sheet metal overhead.
I imagine Lucretius peering into this sky,
calling forth that strong-armed man to fling 
his spear not from the utter edge of the world 
but from this spot—here—only to watch it bounce 
off the sky’s burnished dome with a ringing sound. 
Lucretius wanders off muttering about boundaries 
proving the infinite, leaving the spear-thrower and me 
behind, awed and fearing that invisible void, spear 
plummeting point-first, slicing into soil and 
startling all the cows.

anne boleyn
marked passages
in tyndale’s outlawed book
about popes and kings
and god  

ideas saved for henry’s eyes
meant for revolution
for dissolution
maybe
even for love 

she pressed her thumbnail
into the margin and dragged it
down the page
to create a faint
indented
line  

the barest hint
of annotation

a single furrow
in a pale field of vellum 

that deadly volume
handed over in secret
is lost

but the incisions remain

cleaved
compressed
parted

five hundred years
after radical anne

sat in dim paneled rooms
holding the book steady
atop her knee

scratching lines with
the sharpest part
of herself

i tried marking books
like this once
but realized

i wasn’t clawing at words
for a king
to break a world apart 

and i never once
marked anything
mighty enough
to lose my head over

so i stopped

but not anne

girl with a goal
too huge for her life
too heavy
for her pale shoulders
to bear

she carved
into those dangerous pages
anyway

opening rifts
that linger

still

JULY 2016
"waterfall" // nc literary review (print)

At five I asked my grandfather
what happens to the Chesapeake
when it stops there at the sky
and he told me about the giant waterfall
forever tumbling off the edge of the Earth.
You’ve never heard of it? he asked.
So I believed him and worried
about the big ships teetering there
looking like construction paper cut-outs
pasted with a glue stick
onto the pale parchment sky.
I wondered if they ever slipped over that lip,
plummeting to wherever all the water went.

At nineteen I drove the series of bridges
and tunnels across the bay
watching the familiar shore
recede in the rearview.
I found myself beside the big ships,
which didn’t look like kindergarten
art projects anymore, but like pieces
of an elementary school diorama.
Resurfacing from a long tunnel I looked and
the ships were behind me, shrinking.
Paper cut-outs again, they sat
flat and motionless in the haze.
But this time they pressed tight
against the shore, probably beached
before my grandfather’s house.
Probably blocking the view.

2nd Place: 2015 james applewhite poetry prize
nomination: pushcart prize