Tag: American pastoral
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Roadside Cross
Roadside Cross began as a walk with my dog past a forgotten memorial near a Waffle House and Food Lion. What struck me wasn’t just the decay of the cross, but the quiet choreography of grief—how strangers, puddles, rap lyrics, and rain all participated in a ritual of exposure and forgetting. I wanted to write…
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When the Boys Go Marching Away
When the Boys Go Marching Away began as a meditation on the quiet rituals of departure—how war, faith, and memory braid themselves into the domestic fabric. I wanted to write a poem that resists heroism and sentimentality, that instead lingers in the aftermath: the porches, the ribbons, the daughters named Hope.