Poem · Atlanta Review
White Pelicans, Door County
They arrive without sound,
the way snow arrives,
already here, before you knew
to look up.
A long quiet of wings
folding into the cold water,
and the lake holds them
the way the page holds a word
it has not yet decided to keep.
Poem · Still Point Arts Quarterly
Salvage
What the lake gives back
is not what it took.
A bottle, blunted.
A hinge, softened of its function.
A green so worn it has become
a kind of listening.
I gather them in my pockets
and walk home heavier,
which is to say, more here.
Essay · West Trade Review
A Small Field Guide to Paying Attention
The first lesson my mother gave me was a window. Not the view through it, the window itself. Its sash, its weather, the way the cold pressed against the glass in January and the glass pressed back. I did not know then that I was being taught a practice. I thought I was waiting for the snow to stop.
I am still learning that waiting is the lesson. That the world does not require us to interpret it before it consents to be seen. A feather upright on a stone. A pelican settling its wings. The slow weather of a friendship. None of it asks to be made into anything. It asks only to be noticed.
