Acreage is a chapbook collection of 28 poems that speak to the vulnerability of nature to humanity.
Sample works below:
Sample works below:
Cardenolide
plucking milkweed feathers from a cigar
box like jewelry, I adorn my navel
ears toes, succumbing spaces interrupted
by half listening flesh. wisp by wisp
filling like a pillow until the billowing
bulges bound tepid sentences
that climb for air but
get swallowed.
Consolation
to root to prowl
to climb to site
to thicken to claim
to gasp to grasp
to ache to press
to
to snap snap
Harbor
Asclepias shells sulk like silent sepluchres,
Gibbous moon sections cradling preening beetles and 274 wishes,
Tightly lined eyes watching in cornrow wraps.
Cobalt arches seized by shade
Rock restless with the wind on this Appalachian spring morning,
Shoots clinging to soil and myrrh.
Harbored by firmament, one pearl wisps it’s arm to
prick a curling, relentless weed.
Gaudy and misplaced, the weed succumbs to vanities stolen
By this creature one one-hundredth of its weight
And bows to its stoic neighbor.
A single snail witnesses the drama, then applauds:
Torn between outside in,
Fibonacci’s sour tongue
Unleashes cataclysmic fits to Nature’s sweat beads,
bulbous prisms that force instinct
To recoil.
Acreage
Right past Caleb’s cotton fields, dusty
White clouds turn auburn soil into candy canes.
Clifford Hubbard’s grilling shoulder,
frying hush puppies luring me their way.
I’m traversing a shuck and hull hexagon maze
Midsummer giants lurking, sage striped leaves round my waist
Forcing a do-si-do that flings
me like a fly fisherman casting line towards the horizon.
Refusing to exhale, my cadence returns
Left right
Left right
Left [ ]right
Left [ ]right
Left
Pebbles shape the road’s gully to the Lord’s river laces,
And I follow so many that my path resembles a Mondrian terrain map from above,
Ninety degree angles of compartmentalization tied pretty.
My hopscotch board catapults past contour lines,
Archival framework like Pompeii ruins,
Where ash laden figurines rest.
Sterile untouched unclaimed reclaimed
Land,
Reckoned syrup skies outrunning my words
My waist curving
Like the corner spiderweb arching in August air.
There’s the left hook of God’s elbow pointing
Home, but [ ]
And [ ] and all I see is
Acreage.
Triptych
Tintoretto’s arm steals my grasp,
collapsing mannerism to
crumble statues, statutes
leaving two
wretched, writhing in chiaroscuro hunger while
the other weaves
canvas like trampoline tapestry,
threading tangents into webbed stickiness,
caught by Charles Baudelaire’s modernite:
fleeting tease, slow starvation,
suckled honeycomb parables.
X
caked soil mounds yielded
a trench that cradled cicada ghosts,
tangled worms, gnat hives humming
around candied fungus twigs. Unapologetically dripping
labor bore silence
until seven year olds emerged from the creek,
breaking enchanted canopies with a mirror:
buried treasure
found.
Eve
Love waddles
like hips in Alabama sun
back and forth
girth to birth
heat radiating from ochre mines
burying seeds and
men,
they dig and dig and dig.
Water's a gem here,
ripening the chubby magnolia and white ash til
summer's fingertips press
deep on Earth's pottery wheel
churning seedling into sapling.
Space
a band on
a b andon
a bandon
a
.
plucking milkweed feathers from a cigar
box like jewelry, I adorn my navel
ears toes, succumbing spaces interrupted
by half listening flesh. wisp by wisp
filling like a pillow until the billowing
bulges bound tepid sentences
that climb for air but
get swallowed.
Consolation
to root to prowl
to climb to site
to thicken to claim
to gasp to grasp
to ache to press
to
to snap snap
Harbor
Asclepias shells sulk like silent sepluchres,
Gibbous moon sections cradling preening beetles and 274 wishes,
Tightly lined eyes watching in cornrow wraps.
Cobalt arches seized by shade
Rock restless with the wind on this Appalachian spring morning,
Shoots clinging to soil and myrrh.
Harbored by firmament, one pearl wisps it’s arm to
prick a curling, relentless weed.
Gaudy and misplaced, the weed succumbs to vanities stolen
By this creature one one-hundredth of its weight
And bows to its stoic neighbor.
A single snail witnesses the drama, then applauds:
Torn between outside in,
Fibonacci’s sour tongue
Unleashes cataclysmic fits to Nature’s sweat beads,
bulbous prisms that force instinct
To recoil.
Acreage
Right past Caleb’s cotton fields, dusty
White clouds turn auburn soil into candy canes.
Clifford Hubbard’s grilling shoulder,
frying hush puppies luring me their way.
I’m traversing a shuck and hull hexagon maze
Midsummer giants lurking, sage striped leaves round my waist
Forcing a do-si-do that flings
me like a fly fisherman casting line towards the horizon.
Refusing to exhale, my cadence returns
Left right
Left right
Left [ ]right
Left [ ]right
Left
Pebbles shape the road’s gully to the Lord’s river laces,
And I follow so many that my path resembles a Mondrian terrain map from above,
Ninety degree angles of compartmentalization tied pretty.
My hopscotch board catapults past contour lines,
Archival framework like Pompeii ruins,
Where ash laden figurines rest.
Sterile untouched unclaimed reclaimed
Land,
Reckoned syrup skies outrunning my words
My waist curving
Like the corner spiderweb arching in August air.
There’s the left hook of God’s elbow pointing
Home, but [ ]
And [ ] and all I see is
Acreage.
Triptych
Tintoretto’s arm steals my grasp,
collapsing mannerism to
crumble statues, statutes
leaving two
wretched, writhing in chiaroscuro hunger while
the other weaves
canvas like trampoline tapestry,
threading tangents into webbed stickiness,
caught by Charles Baudelaire’s modernite:
fleeting tease, slow starvation,
suckled honeycomb parables.
X
caked soil mounds yielded
a trench that cradled cicada ghosts,
tangled worms, gnat hives humming
around candied fungus twigs. Unapologetically dripping
labor bore silence
until seven year olds emerged from the creek,
breaking enchanted canopies with a mirror:
buried treasure
found.
Eve
Love waddles
like hips in Alabama sun
back and forth
girth to birth
heat radiating from ochre mines
burying seeds and
men,
they dig and dig and dig.
Water's a gem here,
ripening the chubby magnolia and white ash til
summer's fingertips press
deep on Earth's pottery wheel
churning seedling into sapling.
Space
a band on
a b andon
a bandon
a
.