Tag: Chattanooga poet
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On Longing
I wrote On Longing after placing my hand near the wood that held my mother’s name. The poem examines how material boundaries fail to contain loss, and how darkness presses identity into one shape that cannot be separated.
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Settling
I wrote Settling from the memory of watching mothers place their newborns into cribs for the first time—the motion was exact, almost ritual. The poem examines how objects record tenderness through weight and release rather than emotion.
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Large Language Questions
I wrote Large Language Questions while testing how grammar itself can fracture under pressure. Each question turns syntax into a physical object—hinge, blade, lock—so that language becomes a machine grinding against desire.
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The Dress
This poem began with the image of a man holding a dress in a dim room, an object behaving as both memory and disguise. Its theme is how clothing can momentarily alter the body’s outline and expose what grief refuses to say.
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Expulsion
I wrote Expulsion after realizing how exile can happen inside the body itself—how being torn from one’s own ground feels both violent and necessary. The poem’s theme is rupture as transformation: the moment when pain becomes the only proof of change.
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Snapdragon Fields
This poem began as a way to face the presence a parent leaves behind after death. I wasn’t trying to summon anything. I was trying to name the interruptions that still arrive without warning. The poem grew from that tension—how the past steps into the present, how memory can feel like a visitor who won’t…
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One Face Only
One Face Only began as a quiet refusal. I had just turned seventy and found myself staring into a mirror—not with nostalgia or regret, but with clarity. The poem resists the impulse to chase idealized versions of self. It’s about choosing one flawed reflection over a pile of broken possibilities. The cracked mirror became a…
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Leaving Vancouver
Leaving Vancouver emerged from a moment of sensory disorientation—salt, tar, and ocean air mingling with dread. I was struck by how travel, especially cruise travel, promises escape but often delivers confrontation. The poem explores the tension between ritual and unease, between what we hope to leave behind and what insists on following us. Russell’s suitcase…