As Mourning Doves Persist

My poetry book, The Fiction of Stillness, is available for pre-order now on Barnes and Noble. Official release date August 1st, 2024. Here's a taste: ... The table is smooth and round              symmetric         The chairs are haphazardly placed at the end of this day      I have breast cancer I say into the receiver   [communities must] pool resources   How to produce the sounds of the imaging                report into sentences that resonate with months of postponement weighty contrast on my right side   computing and comparing IM ratios for greater insight                          not sufficient to prove the efficacy of screening   ...

On my back on the table in this your calm room             you caress my ankles and will my body tributaries  to rise up and meridians to exhale  Your knowledge like pulling taffy with buttered             hands   Your strength redirects my body’s river  which you lift and stretch       Then you place a wafer of a small white pillow over my eyes             that I might entirely succumb     to your warm hands draping  like weighted blankets over each of my resting shoulders    With intention    drifting toward chest      measuring every              underground hillock in these my pliable appendages...