House of Gamut • October 23 2025

The First Year of Marriage

We walk the shoreline of the Ohio not touching so nothing keeps winter from numbing our fingers. I stop to watch the dead things float by—a hollowed log bobbing the current,the pale glisten of a fishbelly, an accompanying stink. The crests push to comb

the edges for more debris,lapping at the toes of our shoes, where they sink in mud and squelch when we lift them up. You tell me we’ve been here too long and move on. Birds callto one another, scavenge what they can from the shallows.

House of Gamut • October 23 2025

Wildcat Hills

There’s a forest fossilized underground.


I dream of them—each outlined skeleton,


bones


crushed into the dark shadows that shape them.


They have faces, even the trees.


You can see whole limbs,


each leafa perfect, pointed oval.


They hang overhead, as if to shade


you from a sun neither of you can remember


seeing.


Their voices sound like a moaning wind, the kind


that makes you feel more hollow than cold.

Crab Orchard Review • May 9 2025

PCOS

There's a rose bush that grows in the ditch at the end

of the drive, in the deep-down part you wouldn't tempt

fate on a mower to keep well-kept, so the weeds are half

as tall as it, and you know it stays wet even after a dry spell,

like it tends to do wherever the sun can't come through.

Crab Orchard Review • May 9 2025

I Google Odds Of Divorce After Child Loss

The mud moves underfoot

and rather than suck down it slides

out, legs splitting in the clambering up-

flat in the muck on the too-steep rock, almost

kissing dirt, belly down, nose to the ground, the dark,

mossy scent of the deep woods.

Jet Fuel Review • April 29 2025

The Punch Line

A man walks into a bar,
but this is not a joke. I'm with him,
drunk, and we’ve come so he can buy
me another, maybe to kiss me
or get me to bed. I’m in love,
concentrating hard on what
he’s saying, so I don’t say it
first, but he doesn’t say it either.

Ninth Letter • April 29 2025

The Dollar Value of Fingers

A pinky taken in the mines is worth
ten thousand dollars. A forefinger goes

for five times more. You always wanted
to get out of here, this small town.

Blackbird • April 29 2025

Irinotecan

She traces lazy circles on the soft skin of her scalp, winding the ghost of her curls around her fingertips. This is how she used to soothe herself to sleep. Now she picks at the wisps left behind: a line above her forehead and at the back, just above her neck.

Blackbird • April 29 2025

Pleuropulmonary Blastoma

The mud-suck
of a sandal caught
as I stomp the soaked
earth around a hibiscus

teetering, and we already knew
it was just for this summer,
because we can’t have
live plants indoors with

a sick kid.

Tinderbox Poetry Journal • April 21 2025

Loss Mom

After my daughter died, I looked


for her life anywhere it could have been


hiding—chocolate coins at the bottom


of my flower vase, a piggy bank tucked

Split Lip Magazine • April 17 2025

Two Poems — Split Lip Magazine

Kenneth has his pecker out
again. We can see him
from the window, twisting his hips

in a drunk dance, or maybe
it’s from crack.