Publications

This page links to featured recent publications.

On Foundation Laying

The Washington Square Review

Pampas furls under my skin. The air is slow, heavy with water. To think— once I was pressed, fired, and dried by brick and leveled asphalt, built up into an angular Dutch roof, deep with sloping eaves. My bones were steel, iron and carbon, culled from northern mountains softened from volcanic peaks down to rolling rock. Buildings scraped like nails toward the skylight. Rowhomes assembled like teeth.

Broat

Mayday Magazine

The buzzing performed nightly. Quiet could settle thick as a tongue onto an uncleared field. In the mornings, men would climb out from the earth like beetles, like living things, to see if someone had left food for their snow-lined stomachs. Or news. Deep in the waking woods, a Midwestern boy huddled in a cracking fox hole. Trenches swam up the earth like waves. And when the mirror others came, they were armed with bright cold and stark hunger. Steel caps and woolen coats and foreign guns. Loss—sudden and irrevocable. Tuck fear like feet into boots quickly, quickly, and march the length of a wintered country. 

The many-eyed Giant

The Squawk Back

On the first day I sit in an emptied seat. In the corners. On the couch, wishing it were plastic-lined. I am not welcome here, but they did not see me slip in the doorway, through the window, across a threshold they thought protected, they thought friendly and full. I nudge room for myself. They are strained at the sight of me. I was not invited in.

Memory Recall

Consilience

[DISPATCHES FROM THE LAST VOYAGER

During its Flyby of Neptune,

The Last Planet

12 Years Post-Launch]

Having a newborn during a pandemic

Motherly

I HAVE COME TO ACCEPT that this year will not be my most productive year ever.

I knew this at the start of 2020. I was due to give birth at the end of January and dedicated time to getting ready: balancing work life and home life, while scrambling to make enough freezer food to get me through the haze of newborn life. I knew that we would be challenged without having a "village" nearby—our families and close friends are scattered across the United States and our closest family member lives 13 hours away.

Between Stars

Roanoke Review

Author’s Note: This erasure poem was created from a 1989 photo caption from a picture of Neptune taken by Voyager 2 as it flew by the planet, following its twin, Voyager 1, on its way to interstellar space, roughly 12 years into its mission. As these spacecrafts are the windows to our busy and bright universe, we become their witnesses, their interpreters, and their confessors through the wondrous dark.

Guestbook Vellum

The Normal School

A blueprint.

Translucent skin. Road maps of blue veins scour my arms, my legs, my neck, my breasts, like rivers in sand. Fair blonde hairs forest me. Asthma limits my lungs, wells both. Bear a constellation—Gemini perhaps—in brown moles. Knuckles of bones snake up my back, a curved spine, an inherited tilt. A creature made, unmade. Electrify it; keep those pulses steady as salt.

The Wild Hunt

Luna Luna Magazine

VOICES CALL TO MY BLOOD. It hums when I sleep, electric skin, bones cracking from wood smoke. Marked throat, painted nails. Remember, there, with the woods behind us and the city before. Liminal spaces, creatures, voices. We’re kept in glass, in tombs, in waiting rooms. They press clocks into our wombs, fold over skin and conversation. Make us chase rabbits that turn into FunDip dreams.

Macroglossum Stellatarum

Crab Fat Magazine

WOKE WITH SKIN as heavy and quiet as snow. The trees are dark and wet, washed over with bright scent. Appalachian air clear and cold, breathcloud puffs like jumping salmon, disappearing then reappearing.

Bend with me, ladies, into pose and poise, dipping legs into our days, made long by underwire or traffic.

Our bodies a suitcase we move from room to room.

June 21, 2018

Essay Daily

1/ ONE O'CLOCK IN THE MORNING. I’m awake, awake, awake, and porchlight glows are seeking the cracks in the blinds of our bedroom. I lift my hair onto the pillow—I can’t bare it to touch me when I try to sleep and it settles into place, a thick tongue above my head.

Corsets of Whalebone

Bending Genres

What does it feel like to be dry-drowned by the jaws of a whale?

Stays swim up through cotton channels.

Hooks, black-eyed buttons dot navel to breastbone.

Ribbons braid like a spine.

Stiffness softens with the heat of our sore skin, our beating hearts cresting above.

Keystone

Appalachian Review

MY TEETH ARE ASLEEP AND KIND.  They bleach like limestone, crumble like slate. The old plates are merely lungs, long dormant, having breathed once, twice, long ago. My chest had lifted, my shoulder blades cracking together, pulled up and back. Volcanoes fell down my throat, swallowed into peace, their rumblings lost to other voices, the voices of ghosts who expose my fault lines with paths of asphalt and tar.

The Telling

Atlas and Alice

RUBBER SNEAKER SOLES. Basement bars. Something out of Cheers. Glass bottles filled with amber, glinting dully against wood polished by arms, hands hammers on bartop. Billy Joel is crooning from a corner speaker, a low undertone. I sit under sticky tables, small hands swimming in wide stolen drums of bobbing maraschino cherries.

A bite of red teeth.

Violent Lettings

Gingerbread House Literary Magazine / *Pushcart Nomination

HER FACE IS ABOVE MINE. Ripples murmur over her features—black brows in slim lines. A too-large nose. Perfectly formed lips in plumped half-wedges. Rounded cheeks, pale. A tumble of raven-hued hair. At first, she looks dead. A painting or another adaption of real life. Only a copy. But then her arms move, fingers barely penetrating the water, dotting close to my face. She is not dead, no. No, she is too alive. I sink further back, hidden among weeds and muck. She never guesses. Never sees me with those great black eyes, so like my own.

A FOREST OF FOLKLORE:

THE EASTER EGG TREE

FolkloreThursday

EGGS—long symbols of fertility, rebirth, and love—inundate just-budded trees throughout eastern Pennsylvania each spring.

La Lune D’Ephron

Essay Daily

THERE’S AN OLD ACHE I indulge every so often, when it’s late or early or noon—an ache that grandly I dub the greatest hiccup of my life. Journalism.
I do not regret falling into teaching. I do not regret my students, who honor me with their patience, minds, and hope. I’ve had wonderful teachers and know their impact, and hope that I may act in a similar position for each student who enrolls into my courses. And though I was warned about the thorny path of academia: the dead-end positions of non-tenure track, the risks for women (I still get physically patted on the head in meetings), the low pay, the anger over grades—there are many wonders of this job not solely limited to watching a student excel or graduate—or finding a book they fell in love with.