Two of my poems are featured in the Spring 2019 edition of The Watershed Journal. They’ve assembled submissions by writers from northwestern Pennsylvania. All of our pieces celebrate our place in northern Appalachia, some with folk wisdom like “Today” by Greg Clary and others with a nice convoluted wit like “Wait Not” by Byron Hoot. My poem … More “Vespers” and “Memorial Day” in The Watershed Journal
Thrilled to learn that two of my poems, “Vespers in the Barrens” and “Memorial Day in the Shale Fields” will be featured in the spring edition of the The Watershed Journal. “Vespers” reflects on the land’s and our own mortality in a place where iron was once rapacious king but now the land is a … More Pieces accepted in The Watershed Journal
BLACKWATER & OHIOPYLE BILE The Blackwater’s cataract rages repentless, unremitting, relentless, over the precipice. It drowns silence. * * * Why do you watch him squirt his vulture acid shit? Don’t you see he’s squatting over the Bill of Rights, and the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments? Diarrhea? Logorrhea? He’s already selling his shit as a … More BLACKWATER & OHIOPYLE BILE
We have choices to make, to support those who we are called to support or those who have and will deny, neglect, and oppress with whatever means they have. I will not support those who destroy families by splitting them up at the border for seeking asylum or by shooting, choking, or wrongfully imprisoning their … More Some Thoughts on Vengeance: A poem against legal racial violence
MEMORIAL DAY IN THE SHALE FIELDS Families gather at the cemetery of the first Memorial Day to honor fallen soldiers. The carnival’s din white noise in the background. The Governor invokes the Preamble’s more perfect union, America’s freedom, her might, the first woman to have lain an offering at the soldiers’ graves. Since she was … More MEMORIAL DAY IN THE SHALE FIELDS (Revision)
VESPERS IN THE BARRENS [Revised] These hills were carved by Carnegie’s and Thompson’s full ferrous might. The jack and pitch pine’s brown paper needles and rigid brawny cones… I have submitted this poem to a journal so it is incomplete here.
VESPERS IN THE BARRENS A century after the magnates chewed the landscape bare, jack and pitch pines festoon the barren’s floor with their brown paper needles and rigid brawny cones. Black bears snap to attention, glare at me with that slack-faced suspicion, bolt and sprint through the understory. When I surmounted the steep hill and … More VESPERS IN THE BARRENS (revised)
VESPERS IN THE BARRENS [Very early draft] Men’s insatiable digging rendered this landscape bare for decades. But now the jack and pitch pines festoon the floor with their brown paper needles, their rigid brawny cones. I’ve walked these paths for thirty years, paths where black bears check my intentions before snapping to attention, bolt, and … More VESPERS IN THE BARRENS
MEMORIAL DAY IN THE SHALE FIELDS Families gather at the cemetery of the first Memorial Day to honor fallen soldiers. The carnival’s din white noise in the background. The Governor recollects the Preamble’s invocation, our more perfect union, America’s freedom, her might, the first woman to have lain an offering at the soldiers’ graves. On … More MEMORIAL DAY IN THE SHALE FIELDS (Revision of Memorial Day)
Memorial Day Families gather at the cemetery to honor fallen soldiers as the Governor recollects the Preamble’s invocation of a more perfect union, America’s freedom and her might. Out there in the periphery, the place my effete neighbors call Nowhere or Hicksville a child shudders in her mothers’ arms, nose bleeding and head pounding with … More Memorial Day
Peter Walks for Democracy 