Tag: Tennessee poet
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Ghosted
This poem began as an attempt to track how a presence moves through a house without naming the presence or the emotion behind it. Its theme is refusal—what the body won’t do, what the haunting won’t accept, and how those refusals shape the space between them.
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The Honey Alone
I wrote The Honey Alone after watching bees swarm near a shed in late summer; the scene became a study in pressure and inheritance. The poem examines how sweetness and labor coexist in the same body without sentiment or explanation.
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Reverse Erasure
Reverse Erasure began as a mirror to my earlier poem Erasure. I wanted to see what happens when destruction runs backward — when the horror of disappearance becomes a slow reclamation of form. The poem’s reverse sequence borrows from Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible, but replaces cinematic violence with the mechanical violence of graphite, paper, and dust.…
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Appalachian Funeral
I wrote Appalachian Funeral after driving past an abandoned church near the highway outside Soddy-Daisy, Tennessee, where the wind carried dust from passing semis into the open doorway. The poem’s theme is the residue of faith and labor — how objects, not memory, hold the pressure of what’s gone.
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Ferry
I wrote Ferry after watching a river crossing where sound and weight seemed to trade places. The poem explores how movement and release—mechanical, not emotional—can become a form of grace.
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Peace Wheel
I wrote Peace Wheel after watching monks construct a sand mandala outdoors, where the wind kept undoing their precision. The poem explores the friction between breath and wind—human control against the inevitability of dispersal.
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Ars Poetica
I wrote Ars Poetica while sorting through my own books, watching mold consume the faces of poets I admired. The poem confronts the rot of memory and authorship—how even our self-published titles soften under time’s pressure, yet remain proof of persistence.
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Each Morning Before Dawn
I wrote Each Morning Before Dawn after noticing how the small rituals of care—refilling a bird feeder, waiting for song—can reveal the violence beneath domestic calm. The poem began as a record of sound and silence, but it evolved into a meditation on expectation and dread. The mockingbird and squirrel became emblems of persistence and…
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Shedding
Shedding began as a meditation on the rituals we inherit and the ones we invent to survive grief. I wanted to write a poem that honored the quiet choreography between father and son—the way they speak through thermostats, boiled peanuts, and Dolphins talk. The “fortune cookie” structure emerged as a way to hold fragments of…
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I Will Not Go to the Light Having Known Nothing of the Darkness
I wanted to write a poem that metabolized silence, that honored the gestures we inherit but never name. The title came first—a vow not to bypass darkness in pursuit of light. From there, each stanza became a vessel: bruised fruit, a crocheted blanket, a drawer that won’t close. I wrote it to preserve what frays.