To be published in the Winter, 2026 issue of The Fourth River Literary Journal

Amor Fati

I was drifting in a boat.
Then, in the middle of
this wide blue river,
the water asked me
an impertinent question --
it wanted to know
the scope of its banks,
the curve and reach,
the cut and alluvion,
the pace and gathering volume
that might lift the
bankfull to a place
where, even as guided by gravity,
it would not outlast time.
 
The middle of the river
wanted to know if the end
might be ahead,
if the next bend of this slow
and sinuous meandering
might turn to a murky delta
bleeding to the sea.
 
Water, as is its nature,
lets questions sink in.
It does not want answers --
the favor is in the asking.
 
But in this frail boat
I am too solid still.
I can’t circumvent answers.
So I tell the water
“from this oxbow
we’ll flow to the dark mother --
her arms holding us under.”
I am inundated with answers.
 
Uncertain hands cup
the rising waters in the bilge of the boat,
water not yet brackish,
and not yet from the sea.
I am thinking that bailing alone
could keep us afloat.
But better, perhaps, to learn
to love the sinking.

 

Finishing Line Press chapbook now available for preorder.  Hard copies published in May, 2026.

Published in Cathexis Northwest Press (again...the second time CNP has published me). Out in the March, 2026 issue.

From Mud Emerging 

rain comes early this fall
or so habit alleges
 
a November skyful
of sun has drawn
a white flowering
from the black dirt
in the nearby hills
 
there you walk to celebrate
the season’s edges
where mycelia have woken
to see you
 
their roots connect
the broken will
in the underground –
here there is no place
that does not make you
 
on these humdrum trails
you walk to root out ignorance
and take steps to stop
the myriad screens
that first cause
a fake you
 
here fungi, not the lotus,
remind you
 
*
off the trail
on a small track
to the steep cliff
where the raw light falls
to the darkness
at the bottom
of Baldwin Creek draw
           
picnics once here
or prayers
leave breadcrumbs the size
of chasms
 
the lie in your grasp
has trampled the grass
on this edge
of your wilder nature –
your hand grips
the local rock
 
the coastal mudstone
crumbles as the path
comes to a crag
 
*
these small trails
are mysteries
and dead ends
leading to a leap
in the freefall
of dharmakaya –
 
the main trails:
thoughts begin
small trails:
thoughts end
 
you pay attention to beginnings
more than cessation
 
it is embarrassment,
isn’t it? the very peril
of what you think
 
in the end
the dark winks
to take contrivance
to the edge
and push it off

 To be published in the Fall/Winter 2025 issue of Yanaguana magazine. 

A Chant of Choice

The brotherhood wakes to a bell tuned to middle C.
 
The habits are strong this morning –
those voices carried so long natter on
and slam familiar doors and deny the greater
strength of these trees and seasons
and the singing of the hours. Cosmogenesis and entropy
both clear their throats. The sound
of the universe self-creating does not kid around. 
 
So I raise a white flag
to the very crowns of the trees
that circle my home.
 
Perhaps in last night’s dream
I learned to surrender to habits,
and I received a transmission that helps:
the voices between my ears –
no longer close anything.  Every sound is a door.
What once was less is now more.
 
But let’s be honest, I got kicked out of the Brotherhood
and I say good morning to coffee and self-cherishing,
my addictions of choice.
 
I do not doubt
the power of capitulation
the value of setting matters on the soapstone counter,
marmalade and mortality aligned for one more time,
one last time as though there were time left.
 
It’s another morning of monkeys
left on my back, chipper in the cortex --
the chatter of the universe fixing its mistakes
off key and amused by the filters awarded us.
 
What I want to tell you is that loving these habits
opens doors.  Look at the world
that’s left through today’s threshold.
It is a green song stretching
glittering particles of union
across an inland sea.
A green song that yearns for
the very skin of black holes.
And it is also a shrug
on tired shelf-life shoulders.
 
Do a little stretching every morning.
Practice your scales.
Watch for falling branches.
 
This is the lesson learned every morning:
infinite darkness and eternal light
grow tall from one root,
flow from the same spring,
and both sing a song of no limits.
 
And, oh, the root is not theory.
My bones are a pitch pipe.
My throat, though passing,
whistles with what might have been possible.
Today begins.

 To be published in the November, 2025 issue of The 34th Parallel .

Our Peculiar Garden

You walk in the door
with half a pail
of yellow gall.
 
You’ve tended all
the mysterious places,
on our lands.
You grew a tree
where my face
once filled with parables.
I remember the day
your green hands braided
the rich earth and made
a scourge to purify
our sloppy lives.
 
So now I stop and suffer,
to consider both
the lilies of the field
and that darn unlucky
fig tree.
 
You walk in
with a familiar
tension.  But we
need not toil, nor will we spin,
apparently.
Every fear formed by your steps
is a path. A lesson
of how blood will loosen.
A lesson of opening eyes.
 
These seeds of fate
fall from a lazy grip
to redeem the fallow fields
on their own. It works
if you work it. And also if you don’t.
I agree with you, though.
Our garden’s fruit waits.
“Time to get your hands dirty,” you say.
 
Seize these hands then, too.
They want to be green
before it’s too late.

 To be published in the Fall 2025 edition of the journal The Bridge.

I Broke a Leg Where Pilgrim Feet Once Trod

Scene: the mountains in fall. Anthony sits cross-legged at a campfire. He’s ready for action.

Anthony: I feel no feeling. It’s from this habitual numbness I punch down. The culture made of memory and edited history both numbs me and stirs up my just Cause.  Then it ambulates away from the Effects. Scot free and cheating at taxes, this is what will make me walk like a rich man, right? Walking on borrowed time with no shame.  So I reach out from screen and page and ask you to join me in a landscape of silent valleys. Let’s shatter these earthen jars full of dissembling parchment, let’s let go of the fragments. With the icy fists of poetic license let’s punch a thesaurus, a genealogy, a hierophant’s foot. I complain to the manager that no starting point was scripted, no basecamp imagined for this set piece. The I/thou dialogue in this box of words gets tangled up, pushed into dry paragraphs, and trips over its own workshopped feet. This is the last pilgrimage of autumn, of papyrus and symbols unknown, and it is not the dance you wanted. Twist the bones before the plot, then backspace. The low angles of light allow erasures and mistakes. The fog comes on club feet, and we stumble, parched, toward an ancient reliquary, the Rule gone wild.

(Director’s cut): Wipe dissolve to a wilderness site. Step by step to the foot of the mountain where he set up camp, sidetracked and firewalled by the washes and arroyos, the dried aspens, high desert juniper, all ready for the deluge to come.  Future destinations spread like cottonwood seeds climbing in air. Where? The head holds the map. The head conspires to smuggle messages to the feet.  The feet are ready for any hubbub, though they prefer he not know there is no feeling.  Neuropathic insolence. The heavy demand of awareness weighs on his extremities and abbreviates timespans. Ah, but the gig is, in fact, up.  The film noir’s credits rolled at the beginning. Now he knows that art just obfuscates, assumes what is unwarranted success. It’s all entertainment to disguise death and old age.  I (footnote: this is the director’s voice) don’t think, though, his place in a cave is cinematic enough. Let’s put him on a path open to the elements.

Anthony: Here at the foot of a majestic cedar I stop to collect the debt accruing in your hands too. I pull the map from your cerebral cortex.  The games will start now, the character development and conflict. You think this is easy? Do you prefer nursery rhymes?  I pull you through the screen into my body, and with this alchemy we can transform the numbness into song. Ok, maybe not song, but spoken language. Ok, maybe not language, but a website.

Review from Cahiers du Cinéma: Appendages convey letters, single file sentences.  Lines enjambed to wither the smidgen of your patience left.  The point (both sharp and dulled) is to find a trail to new breath, new lungs, interconnected neurons with name tags for the icebreaker … oh yes, the body reimagining itself with precious mistakes.  The fine print at the bottom of it. No feeling, where there once was feeling.  Words where there was once a canyon of silence. 

Anthony: Oh sweet lord, dry my feet with your hair. These conundrums are toes.  This little piggy went to market.  The desert fathers are bereft of new ideas. Just find me one true trail to get all the way home, is that too much to ask? What, was that my job?  I hear the French circumlocution here in the Eastern Sierras.  It says, “Tony, heads up!” I play the old soundtrack, a disintegrated loop. Mistakes prove that impermanence is the only way forward.

The Review (cont.): The final frame also has limits and unforeseen expectations. We walk, hobbled and humbled, out of the theater, with this wild hunger, with this borrowed body, one painful step at a time. It surprises no one that the rain has begun.

Anthony: Pilgrim, there is no camino. The absence of maps cuts right to the bone. The loss of the old world is a lamp to my feet.

Published in the Fall 2025 edition of Accidental Magazine.  A cheery poem about dementia, loss, and the beauty of companionship.

Sundowning

When the day turns 
and bends away from us
I call you by name
though you do not hear me.

You close your doors; 
light is your brief foe.
Or so you tell me
as you ambush even yourself.

You draw shades
with lead. You swallow the poison
just to make sense.

“I arm myself against you
by drowning,” you offer.  
You salt our memory with this one-way truth.

How I yearn to navigate the book of your life!
I ask you to fetch facts
off the erased pages of your journal
and instead you mark canvas lifeboats 
on a wide and silent sea.
Entries float on each other.
Palimpsest distractions play on neurons,
vellum, and vanity. In place of speech
your hands catch fish. 
You mute confusion with aphasia and mudras.
You remember that in the nunnery
the sign of honey is to set your finger on your tongue.

“Look, dear one, my blood dries on a finger like ink.
Turn around, let me write the password
on your back, then rub away my mistakes,
and tell you storm lies,” I try to sound like rain.
You chuckle when I slap
the bee I pretend is there.
There is sweetness in this familiarity, 
though your laughter isn’t yours.
It comes from another day.

*
This page loses all the words
you scratched in me.

I make a topic sentence to hold
your cold synapses. Then a sonnet of denials.
All to ease the swelling.

I bend this sentence to fit in your hands
just as eventide folds my fear 
into rabbit’s ears of rain.
I beg you to recall
when we ducked for shelter
under eaves whose music  
was the rattle of small birds 
then we slow-danced
in redemptive syncopation.
Your blind contentment was relentless.
How I loved being your mute safe harbor.

But now time has swapped our senses 
and dried the details of your touch,
the scent of your closeness,
the music of your breath,
the wild beauty of your conclusions.
Now your body arms itself
with high tide and low expectation.

This sentence refuses to surface
from the gathering murk, the stumbles.
Its three words are cartoon fingers.
I promised honey from rock 
but I failed you.
As if to prove I am a dupe, I confirm
my wild addiction to the folly 
of our hasty bodies, and how now
dusk’s torch song
forms a foreign tongue in our ears. 
I see tonight that the kaleidoscope 
of your eyes will never
friend my skin again. 
I don’t know our end,
but three words sink, waiting.

*
At dinner I tie a bib on these words.
The words that would fill the air 
with the world 
should you hear them.

But it’s too late, my comrade.
We’ve already picked the pocket of time.
The silver pole holding up the universe
falls with the sun.
In this hour before skunks
the shimmer and glare
of cause and effect decline.
The machine freezes and steals our life.

Evensong sharpens its edge
to cut the pattern of our dwindling. 

*
                 Error, error, fatal error.
We’ve forgotten this operating system
came from stars
even if it will not last another night.

Supper’s ready and we grimace 
and bare teeth. We eat eternity.
We fooled the facial recognition test --
the surrender to hypervigilance
misses what’s true.

It stings, this bitter grace.
Your face cuts into me
with a voice that calls my name.
The luminous emptiness
reveals it wasn’t you 
who had turned from light, but I.
It was I who did not hear your call.
It was your voice naming me.

Now a silence curates our 
long loneliness.
A loneliness that holds us together
more tightly than ever.