“Bejeweled Grandmother”

Recently accepted at California State University, Long Beach’s RipRap Journal

You made me believe that dragons exist,
sculpting opal clouds into pictures for children
in the ruby and gold of summer skies.

You made me believe that, even as monarchs muzzled
my autonomy in an ebony tower, my nurtured candlelight
will seize the world by firestorm. But when I looked for you,

your eyes had faded to gray pearls, leaving your memory
in a bed of citrine sunflowers, a sunset of garnet
epilogues and chalcedony tomorrows.

You’d let me believe we’d fly in pictures
we’d create for children. You’d loved me in sacrifice
until you dissipated into moonstone

clouds. Forevermore guiding my wings
through pictures that you create
towards an amethyst sunrise.

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“Elegy of Aging”

A cento poem from the works of Billy Collins, Jack Gilbert, Nora Hikari, Li-Young Lee, Lateef McLeod, and Padraig Regan

We are most honest when unprepared, in a moment of
faith: that form erupts magnificent from the broken thing,
a sense of mortality without pen or paper.

Medicine cannot fix illicit fears,
the salt in the soy filling the blanks in the dead nerves.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted

to a little fishing village where there are no phones.
Let me at least fail at my life,
a syncopated code I long to know–

the memories you used to harbor,
to bear witness & attend to the whims of the dead.
The soul weighs twenty-one grams,

dewsoaked, disappearing before me.
Let me fall in love one last time
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

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“Semicolon”

Previously published in Phi Theta Kappa International Honor Society’s Nota Bene Anthology

From the moment we’re born
we’re all writers, the masterminds of our lives.
Every breath is a space, a pause a period… or an ellipsis.

Some chapters swell with events and memories while others slip from our minds like misplaced ink.
Some words flow from our pens with mirth while others struggle and resist landing on the page.

A writer’s block can make us want to close the book,
a narrative wavering on a cliffhanger, cruelly destined
to never reach its resolution.

Dear young writers, main protagonists, precious survivors,
your story isn’t over–I haven’t given up on you.
The conflicts are long and painful, the climaxes short and sweet,

but I know you’ll win the final battles with your superpower: your existence,
you’re alive, and you’re fighting, and you’re conquering another day.

So please, when you’re writing your next chapter,
leave a semicolon on the last page
so I know you’ll be back tomorrow;