Category: recent-publication
Essay in Southern Humanities Review: Fragments of Bone, Fragments of Light
The world I had imagined as inanimate was coming into animation—rock and plant in constant motion, each species of animal living along its own vivid timescale. And while I had always struggled with the idea of death, I now found myself wondering why I had only been troubled by this future I would not witness—and not everything in the past that I had already missed.
Read excerpt and purchase the full print issue at Southern Humanities Review
New Publication in Sugar House Review: Moving Poem
Excerpt from “Moving Poem,” newly published in the Summer 2024 issue of Sugar House Review:
There is a game we play
where one of us hides,
only letting a sliver of ourselves show,
and waits to see how long it will take
for the other to notice us.Sometimes, I wait so long
that I can’t decide
if we’re still playing or not.
__________
The full poem can be read by
purchasing the full print issue here
Two Poems in New Zine: bonefolder no. 1
Bonefolder is made by hand in Nova Scotia by Michael Goodfellow and Natalie Rice.
Excerpt from bonefolder no. 1
Essay in Southeast Review: Cumberland by Sail
“I am tiny on the scale of sand and sea—but whether or not I am here to see them, it’s reassuring to think that, at any given time, somewhere beneath the rippling surface among the beds of seagrass, manatees graze. I’d like to think that Cumberland is a lesson in tenacity, but barrier islands have always been shaped by the sea in response to the elements. Now, I wonder, will they last?”
Read the full essay in Southeast Review
or purchase the full print issue here!
New Essay & Photograph in Khôra: Scarification
“All summer, crowds have come to the canyon in steady currents, yet I’ve only felt small and solitary; deeply rooted is that particular form of loneliness that blooms in company. I kneel with the memory of your warm hand on my skin and unsown lands spread in my imagination. Every day I water and weed and watch the light change across striated stone blotted with juniper and cliff rose; formations I can put names to.”
New Essay in Electric Literature
“Making a narrative out of a life requires a lot of distilling. You gather as much flotsam from the past as you can and try to piece it all together just the way you remember it, only now, all your memories are liquid and volatile and won’t form a complete picture anymore. Eventually, you leave out the parts that you can’t make fit or the ones you don’t like thinking about. With time, these pieces fade until you can’t even remember what you left out anymore and the narrative becomes the memory.”
Poem in Flyway
Excerpt from my prose poem in Flyway’s Winter 22-23 Outside Issue:
It’s easy now to forget about summer bearing down, the stories about fried eggs on the sidewalk. These are days I can believe each grey branch of the mesquite tree might be resurrected with spring leaves. And sometimes I think I don’t ask for so much—a lover who makes me feel wanted, creatures going about their own business, the potential for regeneration—and sometimes I think this is so much to ask for.
Read the full poem and check out the entire issue by clicking here.
Essay in EcoTheo Review
A short excerpt from my essay “Convergence” from the Summer 2022 issue of EcoTheo Review:
“The Gila River—opaque as butterscotch and laced with agricultural runoff—is ornamented with styrofoam cups, discarded truck tires and diapers engorged with river water. The vegetation is thick so it’s easiest to move in the river. I slide down the slick bank past the prints of a black bear whose movements I echo.
The calf-deep water is cool and ripples shimmy away from my footsteps like the fish that curl into eddies as I walk downstream. The Gila is one of the longest western rivers. Not so long ago, I could have floated from the headwaters in New Mexico through to the Gulf of California in a kayak or raft. Now, water is siphoned off into agriculture fields, reservoirs and canals that turn the Gila into a trickle halfway through its 500-mile journey towards the Colorado River. By the time it reaches this valley southeast of Phoenix, the Gila, whose headwaters are often called the birthplace of wilderness, is no more than an intermittent stream. My hiking boots saturate and sand fills their mesh as I wade, listening to the slur of my steps mix with the ensemble of birds calling along the river’s corridor. Under the shaded arbor of tamarisk, I pause. I am quiet. Sometimes you can only find a thing by being still.”
To read the full essay, purchase the issue (or subscribe!) by clicking here.
Two Summer Publications: Camas & Pidgeonholes
POINT COUNTS AND SHIFTING BASELINES in Camas Magazine
“Can we celebrate the wild just beyond the doorstep without conflating it with the wildness of places far from any doors? If we expect the wild to adapt to our cities and our lifestyles, where do we adapt to theirs. We must leave space and silence and open places for them to build their own nests, make their own paths through the desert, and communicate with each other in whisper songs.”
Purchase the issue to read in full
THE FIRST TIME in Pidgeonholes
“He sounds like one of the mice that live in the house I will move to the first time I try to leave him, the ones I will set hard metal traps for in the kitchen. I will hear the bitter snap and squeak of them at night when I try to fall asleep but instead replay a recent conversation in which he tells me I am easy to love.”
New Essay: The House in the Desert
I have a short triptych out today in Hobart.
This essay is no longer available on Hobart, but
you can read the reprint in Variant Lit!
New poem in MONOLOGGING
I’m a little late in getting this up, but one of my poems was published this fall in the Autumn 2021 issue of monologging.
Ipomoea arborescens
Beyond the highway,
the desert is abloom
with white paper lanterns
or are they apertures
the arid land giving way at last… continue reading
Publication: Meaning‐Making in Science Communication: A Case for Precision in Word Choice
“To be effective communicators we must have a deeper appreciation for how language and ideas are reshaped in context”
Read the full article on the importance of word choice in science communication in Issue 102 of Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America.
New Publication: What Happened on December 21st, 2019: A Retrospective
New words up today on Essay Daily!
…I had been working on an essay about fragments: fragments of bone, fragments of light, and what the space between these fragments can embody. I’m learning to pay attention to these spaces. A lot can happen in the subtext, in the distance between things, in the space of what is left out, in the time between December 21st and March 16th…
New Publications: Lunar Eclipse off Exit 88 & What Gould's Magpie Has Stolen
Two poems up now in the latest issue of Minding Nature, a publication from the Center for Humans & Nature.
Cover Art by Courtney Mattison
LUNAR ECLIPSE OFF EXIT 88
Somewhere in Oklahoma, speeding through scrubby darkness, we pulled off the highway on Exit 88…
WHAT GOULD’S MAGPIE HAS STOLEN
For its feathers, the prism of light that broke its blacks into iridescence…
New Publication: This Ground
Up now in the newest issue of Vagabond City:
THIS GROUND
…From the ground of this Arizonan desert branches rise as the roots of the sky, and I wonder now, what is the difference between a hundred places and no place?…
New Publication: Tidal Desert
Published this week in the lovely Winter issue of Hawk & Whippoorwill
TIDAL DESERT
…Because I could descend in the chasm of dissolution between the layers of sandstone to where life is pressed like petals,
I began to sense the land’ s lungs beneath the soil, see the hardness of the desert and understand that here, life is not to be presumed…
New Publication: Photography
Two pieces featured in the Artwork section of The Fourth River, Issue 0.5:
New Publication: Mudsoft, Hardtack
Published today in Issue 6 of Sky Island Journal
MUDSOFT, HARDTACK
My first gasp was over the wide Sheepscot River,
mama panting in the speeding car,
holding me in…
New Publication: Ode to a Rock Dove
Published this month in Entropy’s “The Birds” series
ODE TO A ROCK DOVE
—For JPD
You’re right.
A blackbird taken apart
by a raptor is not the same
as the nestling pigeon,
wet from rain,
run into the
clogged freeway
by slavish,
hulking cars.
And of course it was a pigeon—
rat-of-the-sky,
pest,
dirty dirty bird—
call it
what they will,
you wish the authorities
would restore its name to dove,
dove, with all the potential
of cliches.
For isn’t that part of it?
We are a nation
in love with the idea
of pulling oneself up
by the bootstraps,
even as we call them pigeons,
even as we crush their bodies
as we inch forward dumbly
in our commute of tedium.
This ode is to the bird
that hadn’t yet grown feathers
with which to rescue itself
(and was given
no second chances)
so join me, reader,
with the same empathy
extended to the underdog,
and imagine its life if lived:
Imagine the search
for cold fries under a table
in pursuit of sustenance and survival
Imagine the spin and flash
of emerald and royal purple
in the drive to mate and remake
Imagine the power
of full-fledged wings
in the rush of rising up
up above traffic
up above streets
up above city
to look down on all of us.
New Publication: Grafting
Published in the Spring/Summer issue of the Aurorean
GRAFTING
Among high ponderosas in Arizona,
I remember Maine’s white pines—
how after climbing them,
their clear sap drew pieces of that homeland
straight into my hands.
I have been grafted here and there,
with the seasons, out of season,
I have loved light rising like heat
across highways dredged through the land,
woken to a broken shard of sunrise
reaching through a canyon.
I am fastened in transient topography
by the movement of stars,
the constancy of things I cannot hold.
The sun seeps up through the Atlantic.
Maine shifts into the idea of belonging,
in longing, as if it no longer exists.
It is like the memory of a scent.
Download a pdf of the original poem here