Riding DC Metro in the eighties, Durutti Column
in my headphones, only place I ever knew that music –
soundtrack for commuting to the wrong job,
every seat filled with a different silence,
how they could wear bow ties without a trace of humor,
some scanning Tom Clancy but most deep in bound reports,
noting them in pencil because they lived for doing,
for telling others what to do, for anger with strategic purpose,
leaving and arriving at their homes in darkness
holding hours more of work, solo kitchen island dinners,
nightmares about those working harder
and making anger count for more,
while Vini Reilly’s grey guitar murmured on the Metro
and I knew I would fail at this, could see it in the blanks
of those I passed, even the man asking for change
who said “That’s racism” to everyone when they declined
and who’s to say he was wrong, hanging on
in a town of former student council presidents, all of them
trying to make him disappear and me already half invisible
at every client meeting, Durutti Column reminding me
of where I could still completely be, how my back
and forth as daily cargo could shudder to a stop,
once stuck in dark below the streets
my panic rose until I finally made it home
without the extra time my days demanded,
but I could only hear Durutti Column while
on the Metro, drum machines and guitar shards
of a music barely held together,
his mumbled songs my ghost waiting to return
to my body, staring out the window at the stalled
and sullen state of Virginia.

(First published in Pine Hills Review, April 2026. Thanks to the editors.)

My poem “If This Table Could Talk” is live at Stone Poetry Quarterly, a poem about a family kitchen table that started life in an Iowa farmhouse before the Great Depression and is currently a coffee table in a home library in Dallas, Texas – told from the point of view of the table. Thanks to D Ward Hey and the SPQ staff for sharing it with their readers.

I have returned without mountains to my small accustomed place,
bounded by a tottering fence of anonymous color,
old bird bath dark with rusted leaves and clouds of moss,
an exact space defined in all dimensions, detailed in city records,
this bought and paid for lot, entirely without mountains.
I can fill these spaces with one finger to my eye,
I can ask a friendly god a favor. A long way
from blind giants making their own weather,
throwing clouds of snow over granite shoulders
as if warding off some cosmic curse.
Some things are too big to be seen,
blurs of many seasons endured
in an alien morning, photographs futile,
perspective flattens and fails,
the vast forest we spent half a day traversing
shrunk into an afterthought of sticks.
I could never bear Good and Evil on such a scale,
someone once said of a famous book of myth –
the same when I was heavy with mountains,
beauty bearing down with crushing weight,
now sorting through the epic mysteries
to the stormy picture of you near the trail,
snowflakes across the secretless curve of your mouth
like fireflies, a smile I was glad to recognize
among the spectacular indifference,
a smile without mountains.

(First published in Bracken #13, June 2025. Thanks to the editors.)